Toward Human-Agent Competition in TAC SCM

We propose a variation of the TAC SCM supply-chain trading competition, in which human decision-makers compete with fully-autonomous agents. Because of the complexity and time pressures of the competition environment, humans may be assisted by semi-autonomous agents, which could be modifications of existing agents. The research goal is to discover what kinds of decision support will make a human decision-maker most effective in this environment. We show how an existing agent might be modified to operate in this new competition by updating our MinneTAC agent into a highly configurable, semi-autonomous agent that can support human users playing a variety of roles in the modified competition environment. The agent’s decision processes are composed of networks of simple services that are described using an OWL ontology. The ontology describes the structure of the service network, along with the structure and semantics of the data elements that are produced and consumed by individual services.