[agents] TAC 2013 - Call for Participation

[Ioannis Vetsikas]

Call for Participation

Fourteenth Annual Trading Agent Competition
on 15 and 16 July 2013 in Bellevue, Washington, USA

We invite you to participate in the Fourteenth Annual Trading Agent
Competition (TAC 2013), to be held in June and July of 2013, with the
finals taking place during the AAAI-13 conference in Bellevue,
Washington, USA, preceded by qualifying and seeding rounds in June and
early July. You may register for the competition starting 26 March
2013 through 10 May 2013 at http://tradingagents.org/registration/.

The TAC 2013 will include three games:
1.      Power TAC. Sustainable energy systems of the future will need more
than efficient, clean, low-cost, renewable energy sources; they will
also need efficient price signals that motivate sustainable energy
consumption as well as a better real-time alignment of energy demand
and supply. In Power TAC, agents act as retail brokers in a local
power distribution region, purchasing power from a wholesale market as
well as from local sources, such as homes and businesses with solar
panels, and selling power to local customers and into the wholesale
market. Retail brokers must solve a supply-chain problem in which the
product is infinitely perishable, and supply and demand must be
exactly balanced at all times.- Power TAC Game Master is Wolf Ketter,
Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Full documentation and software are
available at http://www.powertac.org.
2.      TAC Ad Auctions (AA). In the TAC/AA game, agents representing
Internet advertisers bid for search-engine ad placement over a range
of interrelated keyword combinations. A back-end search-user model
translates placement over each simulated day to impressions, clicks,
and sale conversions, yielding revenue for the advertiser. Advertiser
strategies combining online data analysis and bidding tac tics compete
to maximize profit over the simulated campaign horizon.- TAC AA Game
Master is Mariano Schain, University of Tel Aviv. Documentation and
software for participating in the AA Tournament are accessible at
http://aa.tradingagents.org/
3.      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 fluctuate and each manufacturer has limited
production capacity. There are also two SCM Challenge events that can
be run if there is a clear expressed interest: a Procurement Challenge
and a Prediction Challenge; these will take place if enough teams
(minimum 6) register for them.- TAC SCM Game Master: Vedran Podobnik,
University of Zagreb. Documentation an open source agent framework for
TAC SCM, and sample agents, are available for download at
http://www.sics.se/tac/. An updated SCM server and log-analysis tool,
with examples, are available at
http://tac.cs.umn.edu/controlled-server.shtml.

The qualifying and seeding rounds will be held in May and early June,
and the first day of the final rounds is scheduled to coincide with
TADA, the Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis to be held at
AAAI’13.

To register for TAC-13, please fill out the registration form before
10 May 2013 at:
http://tradingagents.org/registration/
(Mirrored also at: http://tradingagents.eecs.umich.edu/registration/ )

The entry fee will be US$250 per team to enter one game, or $400 for
all TAC games.
The entry fee (for one game) is waived for teams who send a
representative to the TAC finals at AAAI 2013, if that representative
registers for the TADA workshop (in case a team participates in more
than 1 game, registration cost is reduced to US$150).
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 and information and links about all the
TAC games can be found at the Trading Agents Research website:
http://tradingagents.org
(An older webpage for the competition is: http://www.sics.se/tac/ )
Exact dates for the qualifying and seeding rounds will soon be posted
on the trading agents site (http://tradingagents.org), and sent to the
tac-discuss mailing list. You may subscribe by sending an email to
tac-discuss-request (at) umich.edu, subject “subscribe”.

For more information about the Trading Agent Analysis and Design
(TADA) workshop:
http://agents.tel.fer.hr/tada-13
Information about the Association for Trading Agent Research, the
organization responsible for TAC, can be found at:
http://tradingagents.org

Please circulate this announcement to anyone who may be interested in
participating. Inquiries regarding the competition itself may be
directed to:
tac-support [at] iit [dot] demokritos [dot] gr

Inquiries about the specific games should be directed to the
corresponding game master:
•       PowerTAC : Prof. Wolf Ketter – wketter [at] rsm [dot] nl
•       TAC AA: Mariano Schain – mariano [at] geshem [dot] com
•       TAC SCM: Prof. Vedran Podobnik – vedran [dot] podobnik [at] fer
[dot] hr