Cmieux Adaptive strategies for competitive supply chain trading.pdf

CMieux: Adaptive Strategies for Competitive Supply Chain Trading Michael Benisch, Alberto Sardinha, James Andrews and Norman Sadeh School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University Existing supply chain management practices consist primarily of static interactions between es- tablished partners. Global competition, shorter product life cycles and the emergence of Internet- mediated business solutions create an incentive for exploring more dynamic supply chain practices. The Supply Chain Trading Agent Competition (TAC SCM) was designed to explore approaches to dynamic supply chain trading. TAC SCM pits against one another trading agents developed by teams from around the world. This paper presents Carnegie Mellon University’s 2005 TAC SCM entry, the CMieux supply chain trading agent. CMieux implements a novel approach to coordinat- ing supply chain bidding, procurement and planning, with an emphasis on the ability to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions. We present empirical results based on 200 games involving agents entered by 25 different teams during what can be seen as the most competitive phase of the 2005 tournament. Not only did CMieux perform among the top five agents, it significantly outperformed these agents in procurement while matching their bidding performance. Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.2.1 [Artificial Intelligence]: Applications and Expert Systems; I.6.0 [Simulations and Modelling]: General General Terms: Multi-agent Systems Additional Key Words and Phrases: Trading agents, Supply chain management, TAC SCM 1. INTRODUCTION Existing supply chain management practices consist primarily of static interactions between established partners [Chopra and Meindl 2004]. As the Internet helps mediate an increasing number of supply chain transactions, there is a growing interest in investigating the potential for exploring the benefits of more dynamic supply chain practices [Arunachalam and Sadeh 2005; Sadeh et al. 1999]. The Supply Chain Tr