[agents] Invitation to submit to SCML at ANAC@IJCAI2020

[Yasser Mohammad]

Supply Chain Management League (SCML)
=====================================
You are invited to submit to the second Supply Chain Management League
(a part of ANAC 2020 competition @ IJCAI 2020)


https://scml.cs.brown.edu

Challenge
---------

Design and build an autonomous agent that negotiates on behalf of a factory
manager situated in a supply chain management simulation. The goal of a factory
manager in SCML is to maximize its profit given its private production
capabilities by negotiating trades with other agents. A factory manager can
engage in several negotiations simultaneously, for which its utility functions
are in general interdependent. These negotiations, and any ensuing contracts,
are bilateral. Moreover, they are private to the agents involved. The full
description of the game is available at http://www.yasserm.com/scml/scml2020.pdf

Platform
--------

Entrants to the competition will develop and submit an autonomous agent that
runs on NegMAS. NegMAS is a Python-based negotiation platform in which you can
create simulated worlds, like the SCM world, populated with agents capable of
engaging in multiple negotiations.

Participants will need to install the SCML library that runs on top of NegMAS
and includes the SCML2020World environment. Using this library, you can run the
SCM world with the same settings as the ones employed in ANAC 2020, or with
personalized settings. SCML also includes an implementation of few sample
strategies, which can serve as a sample implementation of an agent to guide
participating teams. A difference from SCML2019 is that Java is not supported
anymore. All agents must be implemented in Python (or have a python adapter that
is developed by the participant).

Submission and Live Competition
-------------------------------

An unofficial live competition will be run this year, beginning February 20th.
All participants are encouraged to upload early versions of their agents to the
online submission site and are required to upload a working agent by May 1st. A
leaderboard will be maintained, displaying the relative performance of all
submitted agents, but no identifying information about the participating teams
will be available. This website is also where the final versions of agents
should be submitted for the official competition (at which point identifying
information will become available). Participants who fail to upload a
preliminary version of their agent to the live competition website by May 1st
will not be allowed to enter the official competition.


Participants must also submit the following (through the online
submission site):
    1. Team member names, affiliations, and contact information. 2. A single zip
    file containing the following (Please use the provided skeleton):
      - Agent source code.

      - Academic report describing the agent in PDF.

Finalists will be required to submit a poster presenting their agent for
possible presentation at IJCAI. Submitted code and the academic report should be
considered to be in the public domain, and may be incorporated in full or part
in future releases of NegMAS and/or SCML or any other media. In such cases, all
team members will receive proper attribution.

Evaluation
----------

An agent’s performance will be measured by its score
which will be the median of the profits accrued by all its factories in all its
instantiations in all simulations. Note that this is different from SCML2019,
which used the mean.

The two tracks (standard and collusion) will be conducted in two rounds, a
qualifying round and a final round. All entrants that are not judged to break
any of the SCML and ANAC submission rules will be entered into the qualifying
rounds. Top-scoring agents in the qualifying round will then be entered in the
final round. The teams that built the top-scoring agents will be notified in
June, with the final results and awards announced at IJCAI 2020.

It is expected that finalists will send a representative to the ANAC
workshop at
IJCAI 2020 in Japan. Three awards will be announced at IJCAI 2020
(with associated monetary rewards) corresponding to the two tracks (standard and
collusion).

The final version of the agent submitted by the competition deadline (May 15th)
will be used in the two tracks of the SCM league.

Resources
---------

For more information about SCML, please refer to the following links:

1. Youtube playlist to get you started:
   https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqvs51K2Mb8IJe5Yz5jmYrRAwvIpGU2nF


2. Live Competition Website:
   https://scml.cs.brown.edu

3. Full Call for Participation:
   http://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2020/cfp/scml_cfp.pdf

Organizing Committee
--------------------
Yasser Mohammad, NEC & AIST & Assiut University (main contact)
Katsuhide Fujita, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology & NEC-AIST
Amy Greenwald, Brown University
Mark Klein, MIT & NEC-AIST
Satoshi Morinaga, NEC-AIST
Shinji Nakadai, NEC-AIST

Important Dates
---------------
February 15, 2020     Official release of the league platform (python)
February 20, 2020     Website opens for submission at https://scml.cs.brown.edu

March 25, 2020        [OPTIONAL] Registering to the submission website
May 1st, 2020         Preliminary submission deadline (REQUIRED)
May 15th, 2020        Final submission deadline
June 1, 2020          Notification to finalists
mid July, 2020        Announcement of winners, monetary prize distribution
                      and league report (during ANAC 2020 @ IJCAI 2020).

Sponsors
NEC-AIST AI Collaboration Research Laboratory


On Behalf of the SCML Organizing Committee
yasser
Yasser F. O. Mohammad
Principal Researcher, NEC, Japan
Researcher, AIST, Japan
Associate Professor, Assiut University, Egypt
y.mohammad at ieee.org
http://www.yasserm.com
(+81) 8056524120
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