[agents] TAC-08 - The Ninth Annual Trading Agent Competition

[Alberto Sardinha]

Call For Participation
TAC-08


The Ninth Annual Trading Agent Competition - Call for Participation
July 14 - 16, 2008

Chicago, IL, USA
Collocated with AAAI-08


Trading in electronic markets is increasingly becoming both a
commonplace economic activity and a topic of special interest within
the AI, Electronic Commerce, and Multiagent Systems (MAS) research
communities.

We invite you to participate in the Ninth Annual Trading Agent
Competition (TAC-08), to be held in June and July of 2008, with the
finals taking place during the AAAI-08 conference in Chicago, preceded
by qualifying and seeding rounds in June and July.

Building on the success of previous Trading Agent Competition events,
this year's event is again designed to spur research on common
problems, promote definitions of benchmarks and standard problem
descriptions, and showcase current technologies.

The competition will pit software agents -- developed by research
groups, students, and others from all over the world -- against each
other in challenging market games. This year, there will be two games,
and two related challenge events:

1. TAC Supply Chain Management (SCM). TAC/SCM simulates a dynamic
supply chain environment where agents compete to secure customer
orders and components required for production of these orders. The
game captures many of the complexities of actual supply chains, where
both demand and supply fluctuates and each manufacturer has a limited
production capacity. Participants also have the option of entering two
TAC-SCM Challenge events: a Procurement Challenge and a Prediction
Challenge. These challenges are intended to promote additional
research and encourage new entries.

2. TAC Market Design (reverse TAC, or "CAT"). CAT software agents
represent brokers whose goals are to attract potential buyers and
sellers as customers, and then to match buyers with sellers. The
brokers -- known as specialists -- compete with one another in doing
this, in the same way as, say, the London Stock Exchange competes with
the NYSE for the business of stock traders.

The market games have been specially designed to present agents with
difficult decision problems and admit a wide variety of potential
bidding and negotiation strategies.


Documentation and open source software for participating in TAC SCM,
including servers and sample agents, are available for download at:

    http://www.sics.se/tac/

Preliminary documentation and software for participating in the CAT
Tournament are accessible via sourceforge. Access details and other
CAT information is available at:

    http://www.marketbasedcontrol.com/blog/index.php?page_id=5

The qualifying and seeding rounds will be held in June and July, and
the first day of the final rounds is scheduled to coincide with the
Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA) workshop to be held at
AAAI-08.

To register for TAC-08, please fill out the registration form at:

    http://www.sics.se/tac/intent.php

The entry fee will be US$250 per team to enter one game, or $400 for
both TAC games. For TAC SCM the entry fee is the same independently of
the number of challenge events in which a team competes.

The entry fee is waived for teams who send a representative to the TAC
finals at AAAI-08, if that representative registers for the TADA
workshop. A given individual may represent one team for one game.

Note: Please send any questions regarding the fees to tac [at]
tradingagents.org.  Groups unable to afford the entry fee may also
contact tac [at] tradingagents.org for special consideration.


General information about TAC can be found at:

    http://www.sics.se/tac/

Exact dates for the qualifying and seeding rounds will soon be posted
on this site.

More information about the Trading Agent Analysis and Design (TADA)
workshop is available at:

    http://tac.cs.umn.edu/tada08/

Information about the Association for Trading Agent Research running
TAC is available at:

    http://tradingagents.org

Please circulate this announcement to anyone who may be interested in
participating.  Inquiries may be directed to tac-support at cs.umn.edu