Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Ta b l e 3 .
Production scheduling for day
d
•
list the orders with due date
d
+2in list 1;
•
list late orders (but still valid
d −
3
≤ d
due
≤ d
+1) in the decreasing order
of the due date into list 2;
•
list the future orders (due date
≥ d
+3) in the increasing order of the due
date into list 3;
•
append list 2 to list 1 and list 3 to list 2;
•
for each order in the combined list
- if computers in the inventory can fill the order then deliver computers;
- else if components are available and factory capacity is not full
then produce more PCs to fill the order;
•
if there is extra factory capacity left and enough components,
then check whether additional PCs should be produced.
needed computers on time). However, if there are still factory assembling cycles left
and the numbers of finished PCs are below a certain threshold then the agent produces
additional PCs of each kind uniformly (if there are enough components) to maximise
the factory utilisation. In particular, this strategy benefits the agent when there is a low
demand in the market (because there are actually spare cycles) and it works well in
the final stages of the game. For example, on Day 217, the agent can bid on customer
orders that come in on that day, meaning it gets the orders on Day 218 and delivers the
computers on the last day of the game. If it just used the
build-to-order
strategy, the
agent would not be able to bid for the customer orders on Day 217 because after it wins
the order, there would be no time for it to buy the needed components and produce the
PCs.
4
Evaluation
Our evaluation is composed of three components: (i) the results from the 2004 competi-
tion; (ii) our post-hoc analysis of some of the games in the actual competition; and (iii)
a systematic range of controlled experiments.
4.1
TAC SCM Results
TAC SCM consists of a preliminary round (mainly used for practice and fine tuning),
a seeding round, quarter-finals, semi-finals, and final. The seeding round determined
groupings for the quarter-finals. The top 24 agents were organised into 4 “heats” for the
quarter-finals based on the positions in the seeding round and the first 3 teams for the
quarter-finals of heat 1 and 3 entered into semi-final 1 and, similarly, the first 3 teams
from heat 2 and 4 were entered into semi-final 2. Finally, the first 3 teams in both semi-
finals entered into the final round. In the seeding round, SouthamptonSCM obtained the
third highest score among all the participants and entered heat 1 for the quarter-final. In
the quarter-final, we had the second highest score and we were first in our semi-final. In
the final, our agent finished in 6th position. In the final, our agent was adversely affected
by the fact that several agents sent RFQs on Day 0 for huge quantities of components.
