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The 2003 Supply Chain Management Trading Agent Competition

Published: 25 March 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Supply Chain Management deals with the planning and coordination of bidding, production and procurement activities across the multiple organizations involved in the delivery of one or more products. With the emergence of electronic marketplaces, it is only natural to seek automated solutions that are capable of rapidly evaluating a large number of bidding and procurement options. In this paper, we present an integrated model that incorporates supply chain bidding, production and procurement. We discuss its computational complexity as well as the challenges that arise from the inherently stochastic and competitive nature of the resulting environment. A Web-based multi-agent simulation game based on this model was developed and validated in the context of the first Supply Chain Trading Agent Competition (TAC SCM 2003), where a total of 20 teams from around the world competed with one another. We review key agent strategies developed by competing teams and discuss the merits of competition-based research over more traditional research methodologies in this area.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEC '04: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Electronic commerce
March 2004
684 pages
ISBN:1581139306
DOI:10.1145/1052220
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • ICEC: International Center for Electronic Commerce

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 25 March 2004

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