CSCBench: A PVC Diagnostic Benchmark for Commodity Supply Chain Reasoning

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in general benchmarks, yet their competence in commodity supply chains (CSCs) -- a domain governed by institutional rule systems and feasibility constraints -- remains under-explored. CSC decisions are shaped jointly by process stages (e.g., planning, procurement, delivery), variety-specific rules (e.g., contract specifications and delivery grades), and reasoning depth (from retrieval to multi-step analysis and decision selection). We introduce CSCBench, a 2.3K+ single-choice benchmark for CSC reasoning, instantiated through our PVC 3D Evaluation Framework (Process, Variety, and Cognition). The Process axis aligns tasks with SCOR+Enable; the Variety axis operationalizes commodity-specific rule systems under coupled material-information-financial constraints, grounded in authoritative exchange guidebooks/rulebooks and industry reports; and the Cognition axis follows Bloom's revised taxonomy. Evaluating representative LLMs under a direct prompting setting, we observe strong performance on the Process and Cognition axes but substantial degradation on the Variety axis, especially on Freight Agreements. CSCBench provides a diagnostic yardstick for measuring and improving LLM capabilities in this high-stakes domain.