Three-Staged Cloud Computing Service Supply Chain Coordination By Supply Chain Contract

With the continual expanding of cloud computing industry and the emergence of specialized division, there has been a cloud computing service supply chain in the cloud computing market which consists of application service providers, application platform providers, application infrastructure providers and cloud computing end users. How to coordinate the cloud computing service supply chain and maximize the profits of the supply chain and its members will have an important impact on the cloud computing industry.In our article, we aim to coordinate a three-staged cloud computing service supply chain which consists of one application infrastructure provider, one application platform provider and one application service provider. AIP packages the computer capacity of infrastructure as services and supplies them to APP; APP packages application platform which deployed onto cloud infrastructure as services and supplies them to ASP while ASP in tum sells the value-added application services to the market. The main contributions are as follows:(1) We focus on the new product or application and aim to design a combined contract to coordinate the three-staged cloud computing service supply chain. In this part, we assume the information is symmetry and the market demand follows the uniform distribution. It is shown that revenue sharing contract can improve the profits of supply chain and its members at the same time but it cannot coordinate the cloud computing service supply chain. Moreover, combined contract can coordinate the cloud computing service supply chain and arbitrarily divide the profit. Through sensitivity analysis, we find that it is better to use supply chain contract than the decentralized control when the marker potential demand is larger, the price sensitivity is lower or the range of demand is smaller.(2) We focus on the ripe cloud computing serice and aim to design a revenue sharing contract to coordinate the three-staged cloud computing service supply chain. In this part, we assume the information is symmetry and ASP’s service system is deemed as an M/M/1waiting queuing service system. It is shown that revenue sharing contract can coordinate the cloud computing service supply chain and arbitrarily divide the profit. Through sensitivity analysis, we find the profits of supply chain and its members can be improved at the same time when we reduce the network delay cost and management cost.(3) We focus on the three-staged cloud computing service supply chain under asymmetric cost information and design a revenue sharing contract. In this part, we take ASP’s service system as an M/M/l waiting queuing service system and the market demand follows the Possion distribution. Moreover, the upstream company cannot know the value of the downstream company’s cost parameter, but only knows the structure and distribution of the downstream company’s cost It is shown that revenue sharing contract can improve the profits of supply chain and its members at the same time but it cannot coordinate the cloud computing service supply chain. Moreover, the downstream company can transfer its true cost information to the upstream company.