WatAgent: A Fresh Look At TAC-SCM Agent Design

The Trading Agent Competition (TAC) supply chain management game (TAC SCM) presents a sim- ulated market environment with automated trading agents each responsible for making decisions for the complete manufacturing process of Personal Computers (PCs). Each agent must perform three major subtasks: acquiring components, selling PCs, and managing the local manufacturing and delivery sched- ules. In this paper, we present a TAC SCM design and implementation called WatAgent. WatAgent has been designed from the ground-up and represents a fresh look at TAC SCM agent design. We have implemented adaptive techniques to procure required components in a just-in-time manner, schedule fac- tory production and delivery to minimize late and canceled orders, and set oer prices to maximize profit and sustain manageable factory utilization (against supply-procurement and order-deadline constraints). We also propose an agent architecture consisting of loosely-coupled logical sub-agents. We implemented WatAgent using this architecture and aforementioned techniques and tested it against example agents as well as TAC SCM competition-winning agents from previous years. Overall, WatAgent performs rel- atively well for an all-new agent design and certainly forms a viable platform for future work in TAC SCM research.