Abstract
Supply Chain Management (SCM) has recently entered a new era, where
the old-fashioned static, long-term relationships between involved
actors are being replaced by new, dynamic negotiating schemas, established
over virtual organizations and trading marketplaces. SCM environments
now operate under strict policies that all interested parties (suppliers,
manufacturers, customers) have to abide by, in order to participate.
And, though such dynamic markets provide greater profit potential,
they also conceal greater risks, since competition is tougher and
request and demand may vary significantly in the quest for maximum
benefit. The need for efficient SCM actors is thus implied, actors
that may handle the deluge of (either complete or incomplete) information
generated, perceive variations and exploit the full potential of
the environments they inhabit. In this context, we introduce Mertacor,
an agent that employs robust mechanisms for dealing with all SCM
facets and for trading within dynamic and competitive SCM environments.
Its efficiency has been extensively tested in one of the most challenging
SCM environments, the Trading Agent Competition (TAC) SCM game. This
paper provides an extensive analysis of Mertacor and its main architectural
primitives, provides an overview of the TAC SCM environment, and
thoroughly discusses Mertacor's performance.
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