Abstract
Intelligent agents have been developed for a number of e-commerce applications including supply chain management. In Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM), several manufacturer agents compete in a reverse auction in order to sell assembled computers to customers. In this paper, we consider an individual manufacturer agent in TAC SCM and we focus on the sales task. Using a dynamic programming method, the manufacturer agent is able to find an optimized bidding strategy to decide whether to bid for each arriving request for quote (RFQ). The experiment results show that this strategy improves the agent’s revenue significantly comparing to several other heuristics in the current practice. This approach can also be applied to similar bidding problems in other e-commerce applications.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Pivk, A., Gams, M.: Intelligent agents in e-commerce. Electrotechnical Review 67(5), 251–260 (2000)
Fox, M.S., Barbuceanu, M., Teigen, R.: Agent-oriented supply-chain management. International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems 12(2-3), 165–188 (2000)
Ketter, W., Collins, J., Gini, M.: A survey of agent designs for TAC SCM. In: AAAI-08 Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis, TADA-08 (2008)
Burke, D.A., Brown, K.N., Tarim, S.A., Hnich, B.: Learning market prices for a real-time supply chain management trading agent. In: AAMAS 2006 Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (2006)
Burke, D.A., Brown, K.N.: A constraint based agent for TAC SCM. Working paper (2008)
Kiekintveld, C., Miller, J., Jordan, P.R., Wellman, M.P.: Controlling a supply chain agent using value-based decomposition. In: The Proceedings of 7th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, pp. 208–217 (2006)
Greenwald, A., Naroditskiy, V., Odean, T., Ramirez, M., Sodomka, E., Zimmerman, J., Cutler, C.: Marginal Bidding: An Application of the Equimarginal Principle to Bidding in TAC SCM, pp. 217–239. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Bell, S., Benisch, M., Benthall, M., Greenwald, A., Tschantz, M.C.: Multi-period online optimization in tac-scm: The supplier offer acceptance problem. In: Proc. Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis at the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2004), pp. 21–27 (2004)
Benisch, M., Greenwald, A., Grypari, I., Lederman, R., Naroditskiy, V., Tschantz, M.: Botticelli: A supply chain management agent. In: Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 1174–1181 (2004)
Collins, J., Arunachalam, R., Sadeh, N., Eriksson, J., Finne, N., Janson, S.: The supply chain management game for the 2007 trading agent competition. Technical Report CMU-ISRI-07-100, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (2006)
He, M., Rogers, A., Luo, X., Jennings, N.R.: Designing a successful trading agent for supply chain management. In: Nakashima, H., Wellman, M.P., Weiss, G., Stone, P. (eds.) AAMAS 2006, pp. 1159–1166. ACM, New York (2006)
Kontogounis, I., Chatzidimitriou, K.C., Symeonidis, A.L., Mitkas, P.A.: A robust agent design for dynamic scm environments. In: Antoniou, G., Potamias, G., Spyropoulos, C., Plexousakis, D. (eds.) SETN 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3955, pp. 127–136. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Collins, J., Ketter, W., Gini, M., Agovic, A.: Software architecture of the minnetac supply-chain trading agent. Technical Report 07-006, University of Minnesota, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Minneapolis, MN (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhang, X., Sibdari, S., Singh, S. (2010). An Optimization Method for Agent’s Bidding Strategy in TAC-SCM Game. In: Buccafurri, F., Semeraro, G. (eds) E-Commerce and Web Technologies. EC-Web 2010. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 61. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15208-5_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15208-5_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15207-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15208-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)