SELECTION MODEL FOR THIRD-PARTY LIBRARIES IN IT PROJECTS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.20998/2413-3000.2025.11.5Keywords:
third-party libraries; migration; multi-criteria decision-making; TOPSIS; model; optimization; third-party library selectionAbstract
This study focuses on a model for selecting third-party libraries in IT projects, taking into account efforts, costs, quality, risks, technological effects, and project environment constraints. The aim of the study is to integrate these five indicators into a cohesive model that formalizes the selection process as a multi-criteria optimization problem, with clearly defined objective functions and constraints. This approach addresses a significant gap in the existing area. The study tasks include analyzing and synthesizing scientific methods for evaluating third-party libraries, establishing the relationship between evaluation criteria and project effectiveness objectives, formalizing the five key indicators into a quantitative model suitable for mathematical processing, constructing a multi-criteria optimization model for library selection that considers resource, budgetary, and quality constraints, and demonstrating the model's application through a numerical example featuring several alternative libraries. The study employs the TOPSIS method to rank alternatives based on five indicators, alongside a penalty-function mechanism to address violations of critical business constraints. The results indicate that the proposed approach allows for a unified evaluation of effort, costs, quality, risks, and technological effects of third-party libraries. It successfully normalizes diverse assessments into a decision matrix, computes aggregate measures for the overall attractiveness of alternatives, and incorporates penalties for any constraint violations. The numerical example highlights a case where the optimal choice is not the leader in individual criteria but provides an acceptable balance of integral indicators without exceeding critical constraints. Conclusions: This study provides a novel contribution by developing the first formalized multi-criteria optimization model for selecting third-party libraries. This model identifies five indicators, including technological effects, and proposes their quantitative representation. Implemented using the TOPSIS method with penalty functions, the proposed model enhances the capabilities of decision-support systems in IT projects, enabling the ranking of alternatives while accommodating resource, budget, risk, and quality constraints in complex and dynamically changing technological environments.
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