Supply Chain Trading Competition
CMieux Supply Chain Trading Agent
Recent Press Release (July 2008)
Today's global internet economy is increasingly putting a premium on the ability of enterprises to quickly adapt to changing market conditions as well as other disruptive events. This demand for increased agility applies to both internal operations as well as relationships with external business partners. The e-Supply Chain Management Laboratory conducts interdisciplinary research on decision support tools and advanced technologies aimed at significantly increasing enterprise supply chain agility. Our work combines the use and development of heuristic search techniques, machine learning, planning and scheduling, computational game theory, mixed initiative problem solving, and artificial intelligence techniques. Over the years, the Laboratory has developed a number of supply chain technologies and tools in collaboration with industry and government organizations (e.g. Raytheon, Mitsubishi, IBM, the US Army, SAP, NSF, DARPA) with many of these techniques eventually leading to successful deployment and/or commercialization efforts.
Current Research Focus:
- Adaptive Supply Chain Trading and Negotiation: We are developing and evaluating automated and semi-automated negotiation techniques aimed at empowering enterprises to more effectively evaluate large numbers of trading options. This includes exploring different market mechanisms (e.g. different negotiation protocols, different contractual arrangements) in different supply chain environments (e.g. different levels of competition and uncertainty).
- Integrated Sourcing, Procurement, Planning and Bidding: The focus here is on highly responsive decision support architectures that closely coordinate sourcing, procurement, planning and bidding activities - in contrast to traditional ERP architectures where these decisions are generally decoupled
- Real-time Ordering Promising: Available-To-Promise (ATP), Capable-To-Promise (CTP) and Profitable-To-Promise (PTP) functionality.
- Mixed initiative decision support environments intended to leverage our automated planning, scheduling and trading technologies while allowing users to remain in control of key decisions
- Workflow Management Technologies: We have developed a meta-control architecture that enables users to effectively keep track of complex tasks involving interactions with a large number of other roles across multiple organizations.
- Web Service Technologies for Secure Supply Chain Collaboration: This includes the development of semantic web service architectures and decentralized trust management technologies for virtual enterprise collaboration.
Some of this research is conducted in collaboration with the University of Michigan under a joint 5-year NSF/ITR grant – MASCHINE project, and also involves a collaboration with the EU TrustCoM project.
To promote research in supply chain trading and provide a realistic and competitive environment in which to evaluate emerging supply chain trading technologies, our group launched the annual Supply Chain Trading Agent Competition (TAC-SCM). The tournament revolves around a supply chain trading scenario designed and refined in collaboration with the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) and the University of Minnesota. The TAC-SCM community now numbers around 150 researchers located in 21 countries. Since 2003, a total of over 120 different supply chain trading agents have been entered in the tournament. TAC-SCM is also used in classroom education at a number of top universities.
Our own entry in the competition is the CMieux supply chain trading agent.
The ECRA Journal is also organizing a special issue on "Supply Chain Trading" - see the Call for Papers
Dr.
Norman M. Sadeh
Professor
Director, e-Supply Chain
Management Lab.
Michael Benisch
PhD Student (School of Computer Science)
Ram Ravichandran
PhD Student (School of Computer Science)
Dr. Jinghai Rao
Project Scientist
Dr. Alberto Sardinha
Post-doctoral Fellow
Dr. Bruce McLaren
System Scientist
Jiong Sun
PhD Student (Tepper School of Business)
Benjamin Tsai
SCS/Tepper Student
David Bangertner
SCS Student
Jimmy Andrews
SCS Student
Tim Kirchner
SCS Student
Dr.
Ramesh Bollapragada
Visiting Professor
Linda Francona
Lab. Manager
Former Team Members:
Dr. Jayashankar Swaminathan, Dr. Young Jae Park, Dr. Raghu Arunachalam,
Dr. Hyuon Soo Kim, Dr. David Hildum, Dr. Dag Kjenstad, Allen Tseng, Bob
Schnelbach, Shinichi Otsuka
We are looking for companies interested in partnering with us in our research or in licensing our technology. For further details, please contact Norman M. Sadeh
- A. Sardinha, M. Benisch, N. Sadeh, R. Ravichandran, V. Podobnik, M. Stan, "The 2007 Procurement Challenge: A Competition to Evaluate Mixed Procurement Strategies ", Tech. Report CMU-ISRI-07-123, Sch. of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon, Nov. 2007. Submitted to ECRA Journal.
- M. Benisch, J. Andrews and N. Sadeh, "Adaptive Pricing for Customers with Probabilistic Valuations", in "Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce: Designing Trading Agents and Mechanisms", Ed. by Maria Fasli, LNAI 4452, Springer Verlag, May 2007.
- G.B. Davis, M. Benisch, K.M. Carley and N.M. Sadeh, “Factoring Games to Isolate Strategic Interactions”, Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, May 2007 (AAMAS-07)
- A. Sardinha, J. Rao, N. Sadeh," Enforcing Context-Sensitive Policies in Collaborative Business Environments", in Proceedings of First International Workshop on Security Technologies for Collaborative Business Applications, April 2007.
- M. Benisch, A. Sardinha, J. Andrews, and N. Sadeh, ”CMieux: Adaptive Strategies for Competitive Supply Chain Trading”, extended version of article published in the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC2006). Aug. 2006
- Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce: Designing Trading Agents and Mechanisms, H. La Poutre, N.M. Sadeh and S. Janson (Eds.), LNAI 3937, Springer Verlag, Nov. 2006.
- J. Rao, D. Dimitrov, P. Hofmann and N. Sadeh, “A Mixed Initiative Framework for Semantic Web Service Discovery and Composition”. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2006), Sept. 2006.
- Sun, J. and Sadeh, N., “Coordinated Selection of Procurement Bids in Finite Capacity Environments ”, CMU-ISRI-06-118 Technical Report, Sch. of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Nov. 2006.
- N. Sadeh, "Competing Agents", SAP INFO, October 2005.
- Arunachalam, R. and Sadeh, N., “The Supply Chain Trading Agent Competition”, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2005.
- Norman M. Sadeh, David W. Hildum, and Dag Kjenstad. "Agent-based e-Supply Chain Decision Support", Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2003
- Jinghai Rao and Norman Sadeh. "Interleaving Semantic Web Reasoning and Service Discovery to Enforce Context-Sensitive Security and Privacy Policies ", School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Technical Report CMU-ISRI-05-113, July 2005. An early version of this paper will appear in the Proceedings of the 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium on "Agents and the Semantic Web".
- M. Benisch, J. Andrews, D. Bangerter, T. Kirchner, B. Tsai and N. Sadeh, "CMieux Supply Chain Trading Analysis and Instrumentation Toolkit ", School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Technical Report CMU-ISRI-05-127, Sept. 2005
- N. M. Sadeh, R. Arunachalam, J. Eriksson, N. Finne and S. Janson, “TAC’03: A Supply Chain Trading Competition”, AI Magazine, 24 (1), Spring 2003.
- Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce IV, Padget, Shehory, Parkes, Sadeh and Walsh (Eds.), LNAI 2531, Springer Verlag, 2002
- Norman M. Sadeh, David W. Hildum, Thomas J. Laliberty, John McA'Nulty, Dag Kjenstad, and Allen Tseng. "A Blackboard Architecture for Integrating Process Planning and Production Scheduling". Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications, Vol. 6, No. 2, June 1998.
- Swaminathan, J.M., S.F. Smith, and N.M. Sadeh. "Modeling Supply Chain Dynamics: A Multiagent Approach", Decision Sciences, Vol. 29 (30), pp. 607-632, 1998.
- Swaminathan, J.M., N.M. Sadeh, and S.F. Smith. "Effect of Sharing Supplier Capacity Information". Tech. Rept. CMU-RI-TR-95-36, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, 1997
- Norman Sadeh. "Micro-Opportunistic Scheduling: The Micro-Boss Factory Scheduler". Ch. 4 in Intelligent Scheduling, Zweben and Fox (eds), Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1994.