IOS Press Evolution of a supply chain management game for the Trading Agent Competition.pdf

AI Communications 19 (2006) 1–12 1 IOS Press Evolution of a supply chain management game for the Trading Agent Competition Joakim Eriksson, Niclas Finne and Sverker Janson ? Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Box 1263, SE-164 29 Kista, Sweden E-mail: {joakime,nfi,sverker}@sics.se Abstract. TAC SCM is a supply chain management game for the Trading Agent Competition (TAC). The purpose of TAC is to spur high quality research into realistic trading agent problems. We discuss TAC and TAC SCM: game and competition design, scientific impact, and lessons learnt. With a conscious effort to these ends, a competition may help focus research on well-chosen problems in high impact domains, facilitate comparison of results, and create a community eager to analyze and build on the results of peers and in working jointly towards the perfection of solutions. Potential pitfalls include emphasizing winning to the exclusion of testing scientific hypotheses, and carrying the overhead of designing, implementing, and operating a competition. Keywords: AI competition, software agents, electronic markets, trading agents, supply chain management 1. Introduction Write software to automatically control a manufac- turing company and maximize profits while competing with adversarial manufacturers for limited and variable product demand and component supply. This is the challenge of TAC SCM, a supply chain management game for the Trading Agent Competition. Supporting the competition is a distributed simulation system de- veloped by the authors: a server running the scenario and agent APIs for the participants. In a game, six software agents connect to the TAC SCM server, and play six competing manufacturers for 220 simulated days. A competition is divided into hun- dreds of games, each lasting one hour. Game parame- ters are varied between and within games, and statis- tics are collected to calculate metrics and to benchmark the agents. The winner is the agent that makes the most profit. TAC