[agents] CFP: SCML at ANAC competition. An official AAMAS 2024 competition

[Yasser Mohammad]

You are invited to submit an agent to the Supply Chain Management League
(SCML) of the International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC)
as part of the AAMAS 2024 official competition track.
ANAC is running since 2010 in conjunction with AAMAS/IJCAI and SCML is
running as part of ANAC since 2019.
Check the competition website at https://scml.cs.brown.edu for details
### The 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.

### New in 2024
- We provide support for developing agents using RL/MARL. SCML is now a
gymnasium environment and we provide templates for developing and training
models for the competition.
- The Standard track is completely re-designed to simplify its interface
and development workflow while keeping the core of the challenge intact.

### Negotiation Protocol

Agents are factory managers that control factories with private
manufacturing profiles which are revealed at the start of each simulation.
Factory manager agents negotiate bilaterally with other agents to buy the
necessary inputs to their manufacturing process, and to sell the outputs.

All negotiations are carried out via the alternating offers protocol. This
protocol specifies that two negotiators take turns making offers. One agent
starts the negotiation with an opening bid, after which the other party can
take the following actions:
- Accept the offer
- Make a counteroffer, thus rejecting and overriding the previous offer
-  Walk away, thus declaring an end to the negotiation without having
reached an agreement
This process is repeated until either an agreement is reached, or the
deadline arrives. To reach an agreement, both parties must accept the
offer. If no agreement has been reached by the deadline, the negotiation
fails.
A single simulation runs for a predefined number of steps with an overall
time limit of two hours. All negotiations are conducted for a predefined
number of rounds of the alternating offers protocol (with a predefined time
limit on each).
Factory manager agents are reset after each simulation. This means that
they cannot learn from previous simulations. They can, however, accumulate
information about agents during a simulation, as they know their
negotiating partners’ names.

### Platform
Entrants to the competition should 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.

### Submission and Live Competition
An unofficial live competition will be run this year, beginning January
8th. 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 April 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).

### Evaluation
The competition 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 organizing committee maintains the right to require that
agents surpass a minimum score threshold to advance to the finals or to win
one of the prizes.
The teams that build the top-scoring agents will be notified in July, with
the final results and awards announced at AAMAS 2024 in Auckland. It is
expected that finalists will send a representative to the ANAC workshop at
AAMAS 2024, whether it is virtual or in-person, where they will be given
the opportunity to give a brief presentation describing their agent. Three
awards will be announced at AAMAS 2024 (with associated monetary rewards)
corresponding to the two tracks (Standard, and OneShot).
The latest version of the agent submitted before the competition deadline
will be used in the SCM league unless participants opt-out of the official
competition.

### Resources
For more information about SCML, please refer to the competition's [main
website](https://scml.cs.brown.edu).

### Questions and Answers
Please check our FAQ. You can post your questions there (preferable), or
address any concerns you prefer to remain private to Yasser Mohammad.
### Organizing Committee
- Yasser Mohammad, NEC-AIST AI Collaborative Research Laboratory (main
contact)
- Katsuhide Fujita, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology &
NEC-AIST
- Amy Greenwald, Brown University
- Mark Klein, MIT
- Satoshi Morinaga, NEC-AIST AI Collaborative Research Laboratory
- Shinji Nakadai, NEC-AIST AI Collaborative Research Laboratory
### Important Dates
- Registration on the competition website (Recommended): March 21st, 2024
- Preliminary submission deadline (REQUIRED): **March 23rd, 2024**
- Final submission deadline: **April 3rd, 2024**
- Academic Report submission deadline: **April 5th 2024**
### Sponsors
- [NEC-AIST AI Cooperative Research Laboratory](
https://www.airc.aist.go.jp/en/project/overview.html)
The organizing committee would like to thank Brown University for hosting
the online submission website at [https://scml.cs.brown.edu](
https://scml.cs.brown.edu).
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