Strategies for Supply Chain Management for the Trading Agent

In an effort to address the of increasingly sophisticated and advanced methods of supply

chain management, a joint team of researchers from the e-Supply Chain Management Lab at

Carnegie Mellon University, formed The Trading Agent Competition (TAC). This particular

forum was designed to address the problem of trading agent competition within the global

marketing structure. Within this writing, the problems inherent to trading agent competition will

be addressed and certain formulas will determine the validity of such theorems.

A definitive description of a supply chain can be described as “a process that transforms

materials into products and delivers them to customers through specific activities” 1. An overall

objective of supply chain management is to improve upon the timely delivery of goods to

suppliers and customers alike, thus while keeping costs at a minimum. This includes all handling

and storage costs involved within the supply chain management process. Key aspects of the

stages involved are securing raw materials, manufacturing, storing, negotiating, the receipt of

customer orders, and delivering the products, paired with using standards adopted from long

withstanding relationships between major trading firms.

1 P.B. Schary, T. Skjott-Larsen, Managing the Global Supply Chain,

second ed., Copenhagen Business School Press, 2001.

The pretense of the practice utilizes six agents for each TAC SCM game. The games are

played for a total of 200 simulated days, each being fifteen seconds long. For each day, the

agents will compete in two markets consisting of the supplier side and the customer side. The

ability to maintain an inventory level is based upon building and selling different types of PC’s is

the key determining