Trading Agent Competition - TAC-2010

The Eleventh Annual Trading Agent Competition 

Call for Participation
June 7 - 8, 2010

Boston, MA, USA
Collocated with EC'10 (ACM Conf. on Electronic Commerce)

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

We invite you to participate in the Eleventh Annual Trading Agent Competition (TAC-10), to be held in May and June of 2010, with the finals taking place during the EC'10 conference in Boston, Massachusetts, preceded by qualifying and seeding rounds in May and June.

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.

The competition will pit software agents -- developed by research groups, students, and others from all over the world -- against each other in challenging market games. This year, there will be three games, and up to two related challenge events:

1. 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.

2. 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.

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. Participants also have the option of entering two SCM Challenge events: 

• 
  
  

  a Procurement Challenge and 

• 
  
  

  a Prediction Challenge;

these will take place if enough teams (minimum 6) register for them.

The market games have been specially designed to present agents with difficult decision problems and admit a wide variety of potential bidding and negotiation strategies.

Preliminary documentation and software for participating in the AA Tournament are accessible at:

http://aa.tradingagents.org/ 

Preliminary 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

Documentation and open source software for participating in TAC SCM, including servers and sample agents, are available for download at:

http://www.sics.se/tac/

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 the Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA) workshop to be held at EC'10.

To register for TAC-10, please fill out the registration form at:
(will be activated in the next weeks)

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. 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 EC'10, 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.

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

http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/conferences/tada2010/

Information about the Association for Trading Agent Research running TAC is available at:

http://tradingagents.org

Please circulate this announcement to anyone who may be interested in participating. Inquiries may be directed to tac-support@cs.umn.edu