Trading Agent Competition - TAC SCM Game Description

Supply chain management is concerned with planning and coordinating the activities of organizations across the supply chain, from raw material procurement to finished goods delivery. In today’s global economy, effective supply chain management is vital to the competitiveness of manufacturing enterprises as it directly impacts their ability to meet changing market demands in a timely and cost effective manner. With annual worldwide supply chain transactions in the trillions of dollars, the potential impact of performance improvements is tremendous.

While today’s supply chains are essentially static, relying on long-term relationships among key trading partners, more flexible and dynamic practices offer the prospect of better matches between suppliers and customers as market conditions change. Adoption of such practices has however proven elusive, due to the complexity of many supply chain relationships and the difficulty in effectively supporting more dynamic trading practices.

TAC SCM was designed to capture many of the challenges involved in supporting dynamic supply chain practices, while keeping the rules of the game simple enough to entice a large number of competitors to submit entries. The game has been designed jointly by a team of researchers from the e-Supply Chain Management Lab at Carnegie Mellon University and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS).

The full specification is available as a PDF here.

Figure 1: In TAC SCM an agents task is to manufacture PC’s, win customer orders, and procure components.