Learning market prices in real-time supply chain management

This paper proposes a model for dynamic pricing that combines knowledge of production capacity and existing commitments, reasoning about uncertainty and learning of market conditions in an attempt to optimise expected profits. In particular, the market conditions are represented as a set of probabilities over the success rate of product prices, and those prices are learned online as the market develops. The dynamic pricing model is integrated into a real-time supply chain management agent using the Trading Agent Competition Supply Chain Management game as a test framework. We evaluate the agent experimentally in competition with other supply chain agents, and demonstrate the benefits of incorporating more market data into the dynamic pricing mechanism. Email addresses: [email protected] (David A. Burke), [email protected] (Kenneth N. Brown), [email protected] (S. Armagan Tarim), [email protected] (Brahim Hnich). Preprint submitted to Elsevier Science 29 January 2007