Rethinking the Trading Agent Competition: Lessons Learned from a Decade of Enhancing Autonomous Supply Chain Management

The Trading Agent Competition (TAC) is an international forum which promotes high-quality research aimed at enhancement of autonomous business process management by encouraging teams from all around the world to implement software agents for competing in various market simulations. One of TAC competitive scenarios is Supply Chain Management (SCM) where six agents compete by buying components, assembling PCs from these components and selling assembled PCs to customers. Since its introduction in 2003, about 80 competing teams from 25 different countries participated in TAC SCM Competitions.  This seminar, by analysing games from the TAC SCM Finals 2003-2012, demonstrates how competing agents’ strategies evolved during the first decade of TAC SCM Competitions, leading towards more efficient outcomes of TAC SCM games. Furthermore, the seminar analyzes the TAC SCM scenario from the perspective of business strategy frameworks and proposes a redesign of the TAC SCM eco-system. The TAC SCM 2.0 Competition should go step further from software agent only simulation platform for enhancement of industrial autonomous SCM practices towards a mixed platform of software agents and humans that would enable not just analyzing how new strategies compete one against other in a fixed industry environment, but as well as learning about dynamics of well-known strategies in different industry settings.

This seminar is organised by the Erasmus Centre for Future Energy Business.