Knapsack-Sharing Model for Hybrid Hosting of Enterprise Resource Planning Software on IaaS Clouds

The knapsack-sharing problem is a classical NP-Complete problem in Operational Research area with many application domains. Cloud Computing and Enterprise Resource Planning constitute hot research and application topics thanks to their direct impact on the success or failure of contemporary organizations. The competitive value of an organization relies on how much it adopts Cloud Computing and Enterprise Resource Planning solutions. This paper proposes a new improvement of the Sharknap exact algorithm to solve the knapsack-sharing problem instances with a large number of items and classes. In addition, it describes the use of the knapsack-sharing problem to solve the problem of hybrid hosting of Enterprise Resource Planning software on cloud environments. This study widens the application fields of the knapsack-sharing problem to include Enterprise Resource Planning systems and Cloud Computing. On one hand, the proposed approach helps the Cloud Service Provider in computing the cost of hosting such complex Enterprise software by solving a knapsack-sharing problem instance. On the other hand, it helps the organization’s management in the fair distribution of the budget among departments and business areas. Further, the proposed approach helps the organization’s management in deciding what processes to move to the cloud platform and what other processes to keep in the in-house servers. The experimental work reveals a substantial improvement in running time to find the optimal solution of the proposed enhancements against the Sharknap exact algorithm. Thus, the improved Sharknap algorithm can be applied to the problem of Hybrid Hosting of ERP Modules on the Cloud thanks to its runtime performance.