Designing and evaluating an adaptive trading agent for supply Chain management

Abstract

This paper describes the design and evaluation of SouthamptonSCM, a finalist in the 2004 International Trading Agent Supply Chain Management Competition (TAC SCM). In particular, we focus on the way in which our agent sets its prices according to the prevailing market situation and its own inventory level (because this adaptivity and flexibility are the key components of its success). Specifically, we analyse our pricing model's performance both in the actual competition and in controlled experiments. Through this evaluation, we show that SouthamptonSCM performs well across a broad range of environments. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.