Abstract
Cloud computing is a configurable resource model “that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” (NIST). In cloud computing services, buyers and sellers always have strong (leader) or weak (follower) influence, and leaders have the authority to make decisions. Considering how to only reduce the buyer's cost or increase the seller's profit does not reflect the economic situation in reality; therefore, we propose applying the Stackelberg leadership model to the hierarchical structure in cloud computing. Bi-level programming (BLP) can be used to model non-cooperative decision systems, and we propose combining BLP with a simplified swarm optimization (SSO) technique that we call Bi-level Simplified Swarm Optimization (BLSSO) to solve the decision problem. This algorithm uses a dynamic regional search and guarantees global convergence. Computational results show that the proposed BLSSO technique is very competitive and satisfies a number of criteria, including the number of times the best solution is found, average number of the earliest best solution found, and total computational time.