Carlos R. Jaimez González

Socrates: a Trading Agent for the TAC SCM'04 (Jun - Sep 2004)

Overview

One of the areas that agent technology can be applied to is the supply chain management, which deals with planning and coordinating the activities of organizations through the process of getting raw material from suppliers, manufacturing products and delivering them to customers.

The Trading Agent Competition (TAC) is an annual event, in which teams from Institutions and Universities from around the world participate in a scenario designed to promote and encourage research into the trading agent problem. The trading agent problem is basically how to maximize the profits of someone who buys, sells and produces products in a given market situation with specific rules.

The aim of the project was to investigate and implement strategies to deal with the suppliers and the problem that the agents as manufacturers face when they have to acquire components to manufacture PCs, in the context of the Supply Chain Management game of the Trading Agent Competition (TAC SCM’04), which was designed to contain many of the challenges involved in supporting dynamic supply chain practices.

I developed the agent named Socrates (in Java 1.4) as part of my Dissertation project of my master degree, under the supervision of Dr Maria Fasli. Socrates was used to test the set of strategies in the actual TAC competition, which took place from the 7th of June 2004 to the 22nd of July 2004. The aim of the project was successfully accomplished. There were six strategies designed and implemented, and they were extensively tested in the actual competition and in controlled experiments. The success of the agent was demonstrated because it could go into the semifinals in the TAC SCM’04 and it was placed among the best 12 agents out of 31.

The agent was responsible for the tasks shown in the figure below.


Socrates events


The following two papers were published from this work, and some other experiments carried out in 2005: