Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Mr.UMBC
FreeAgent
SouthamptonSCM
RFQs
Offers
Orders
RFQs
Offers
Orders
Customer
Component
Agent
Agent
orders
inventory
inventory
Deliveries
Deliveries
Factory Agent
Fig. 1.
Overview of the SouthamptonSCM agent
3
SouthamptonSCM
SouthamptonSCM can be decomposed into three sub-agents (see Figure 1).
1
The
com-
ponent agent
decides which RFQs and which orders to send to which suppliers. The
cus-
tomer agent
receives RFQs from the customers and decides what offers to respond with.
It also communicates with the factory agent to obtain the updated inventory levels and to
send the relevant customer PC orders. The
factory agent
receives the supplies delivered
from the suppliers, decides based on the available resources (computer components and
factory cycles) in what order the customer orders should be produced, and determines
the schedules for delivering the finished PCs to the customers. We now deal, in turn, with
each of these sub-agents.
3.1
The Component Agent
The price offered by a supplier in response to an RFQ is based entirely on its available
production capacity and the quantity agents ask for (
i.e.
, price increases as capacity
decreases or quantity required increases). On Day 0, all the suppliers have their full
capacity available, thus the prices they offer are at their lowest value. Therefore, intu-
itively, it makes sense to order a large number of components on Day 0 (indeed this was
a widely used tactic in the 2003 competition [9]). However, due to a rule change, the
components now attract a storage cost. Thus the more the agent stores and the longer
it stores it, the higher the storage cost. This means the key challenge of the component
agent is to attain an appropriate balance between availability and timeliness. This is hard
because if the agent buys more units early (at lower prices) it has to pay for storage and
some components may be unused at the end of the game. However if the agent just buys
what it needs when it is needed, it may end up without the necessary components at the
necessary time (since there is often a delay between the actual delivery date and the one
the suppliers promise). Given this, our agent makes a trade-off between placing a big
order on Day 0 and buying gradually during the rest of the game.
In more detail, experience from practise games showed that despite the storage cost,
having a reasonably big order on Day 0 is still profitable because of the low prices that
1
1
Here we use the notion of sub-agents (instead of modules) because each of them can au-
tonomously communicate with the suppliers and customers to get the RFQs, can send offers
and obtain orders, and can decide how to respond to this information.
