Trading Agent Competition, July 16 - 17, 2011

Call for Participation: TAC-2011

Twelfth Annual Trading Agent Competition, July 16 - 17, 2011

Barcelona, Spain --- Co-located with IJCAI 2011, the 22nd
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

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

We invite you to participate in the Twelfth Annual Trading Agent
Competition (TAC-11), to be held in June and July of 2011, with the
finals taking place during the IJCAI-11 conference in Barcelona,
preceded by qualifying and seeding rounds in June and early July. You
may register for the competition starting 15 December 2010 through 30
April 2011 at http://www.sics.se/tac/intent.php.

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. In addition to the
events of 2010, we have two new events this year: Power TAC, which
studies retail electric power markets, and the Lemonade Stand Game,
a subtle abstract strategy game.

The competition will pit software agents, developed by research
groups, students, and others from all over the world, against each
other in challenging competitive simulation scenarios.  These
scenarios are designed to present competing agents with difficult
decision problems and admit a wide variety of potential bidding and
negotiation strategies.

The 2011 competiton will include five 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. Preliminary information is available at
  www.powertac.org. Full documentation and software available soon.

2. Lemonade Stand Game. It is summer on Lemonade Island, and you need
to make some cash. You set up a lemonade stand on the beach
(which goes all around the island), as do two other
entreupeneurs. There are twelve
places to set up, evenly spaced around the island. Your
price is fixed, and all customers go to the nearest lemonade stand.
Every night, everyone moves under cover of darkness
(simultaneously) and in the morning, their locations are fixed. There
is no cost to move. After 100 days of summer, the game is over. The
utility of the repeated game is the sum of the utilities of
single-shot games.

- This is an "affiliated" game, organized by Martin
  Zinkevich. Information is available at
  http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/lemonadegame/

3. 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 Patrick R. Jordan, Yahoo! Labs.
  Documentation and software for participating in the AA
  Tournament are accessible at  http://aa.tradingagents.org/

4. TAC Market Design (reverse TAC, or "CAT"). CAT software agents
represent market makers whose goals are to attract potential buyers
and sellers as customers, and then to match buyers with sellers. The
market makers compete with one another in doing this, such as the
London Stock Exchange competes with the NYSE for the business of stock
traders.

- CAT Game Master: Tim Miller, University of Melbourne. 
  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

5. 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 June and early 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
IJCAI'11.

To register for TAC-11, please fill out the registration form before
30 April 2011 at:

    http://www.sics.se/tac/intent.php

The entry fee will be US$250 per team to enter one game, or $400 for
all TAC games, except that there is no fee for the Lemonade Stand
Game. 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 IJCAI 2011, 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, and sent to the tac-discuss mailing list. You may
subscribe by sending an email to tac-discuss-request (at) umich.edu,
subject "subscribe".

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

    http://issel.ee.auth.gr/tada2011/

Information about the Association for Trading Agent Research, the
organization responsible for TAC, is 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