Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Ta b l e 1 .
Pricing strategy on day
d
•
list RFQs in decreasing order of (
p
res
− c
penalty
/q
)
•
update the production capacity
C
[
k
] of each day
k
• offeredCycles
=0and
reservedCycles
[
k
]=0
•
calculate the reference price for each kind of PC
p
ref
•
for each RFQ in the list
-
p
offer
=
max{p
ref
×
(1 +
f
(
d
due
))
,p
base
}
-ifPCinventory
≥ q
then
-offer
q
PCs at
p
offer
- decrease PC inventory by
q
- else if component inventory
≥ q
and
reservedCycles
[
d
due
−
2] +
q × o
i
≤ C
[
d
due
−
2]
× λ
then
-offer
q
PCs at
p
offer
- increase
offeredCycles
by
q × o
i
- decrease
reservedCycles
[
d
due
−
2] by
q × o
i
- decrease component inventory accordingly
- else do not offer PCs to this customer
updates the available production cycles for each day based on the customer orders that
have just been received. Specifically, for each RFQ, the agent first checks whether it can
be supplied from its stock of finished PCs (see Section 3.3). If it can, the correspond-
ing PC inventory is decreased. Otherwise, the agent checks whether it holds enough
components in its inventory and whether it has a sufficiently high remaining production
capacity
C
[
d
due
−
2), which is the latest the PCs can be produced.
3
If it does, the agent decreases its component inventory and
reservedCycles
for day
(
d
due
−
2] on day (
d
due
−
o
i
,where
o
i
2) accordingly and increases the number of cycles offered (
q
×
is
the cycles needed for PC type
i
)onthatday.
Now the agent needs to consider what price can be offered to the RFQ. Based on the
demand in the market, the inventory level, and how far we are into the game, the agent
first computes a
reference price
(
p
ref
) that corresponds to a reasonable current market
price. Thus for PC type
i
:
p
ref
=
p
low
+(
p
i
high
− p
low
)
r,
(1)
where
p
low
,
p
i
high
are the lowest and highest transaction prices of PC type
i
on the
previous day, and
r
[0
.
4
,
1
.
2] is an
adjustment factor
that determines how far away the
reference price is from the lowest price. This adjustment factor is set through the fuzzy
reasoning mechanism and is adapted according to the quantity of orders received and the
number of orders expected (see Section 3.2 for more details). However, given an RFQ,
the offer price is not the reference price of PC type
i
.Rather,
p
offer
is the maximum
of the cost for PC type
i
(
p
base
is the money spent buying the constituent components)
∈
3
Note that for an RFQ with the due date
d
, the agent checks whether it can be produced on
the latest possible day (
d −
2) because this has previously been shown to be effective in this
scenario [2].
