Evaluating adaptive customer strategies in TAC SCM

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is a complex process which includes a number of interrelated activities such as: negotiating with suppliers for raw materials, competing for customer orders, managing inventory, scheduling production, and delivering goods to customers. In this paper we present a number of strategies to be examined in the domain of SCM. We introduce a multi-agent system which we used to evaluate the proposed methods. We tested the system in the Trading Agent Competition SCM game, which offers a realistic simulated environment for studying SCM strategies. Although we introduce a number of strategies, we concentrate on the ones for predicting winning bidding customer prices to support a successful performance on the customer side of the supply chain. Copyright © 2008, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.