Component-based design for a trading agent

MinneTAC is an agent designed to compete in the SupplyChain Trading Agent Competition [4]. It is also designed to support the needs of a group of researchers, each of whom is interested in different decision problems related to the competition scenario. The design of MinneTAC breaks out each basic behavior into a separate, configurable component. Dependencies between components are almost non-existent. The agent itself is defined as a set of ”roles”, and a working agent is one for which a component is supplied for each role. This allows each user to focus on a single problem and work independently, and it allows multiple user to tackle the same problem in different ways. A working MinneTAC agent is completely defined by a set of configuration files that map the desired roles to the code that implements them, and that set parameters for the components. This paper describes the design of MinneTAC and evaluates its effectiveness in support of our research agenda, and in its competitiveness in the TAC-SCM game environment.