Performance benchmarks and cost sharing models for B2B supply chain information systems

In this paper, we propose a set of standard benchmarks for evaluating B2B supply chain information systems. The supply chain management systems that we focus on communicate between collaborating partners via the Internet using such languages as the extensible markup language. We divide the benchmarks into three distinct categories: benchmarks to study the performance of querying a partner's data, modifying a partner's data, transmitting large amounts of data between partners. We propose a model for estimating the data-communication and computation times incurred by the B2B information system using the above benchmarks. In addition, we discuss an algorithm for equitable sharing of the costs of a virtual private network by the partners. We present numerical examples to describe an actual application of the above models.