Over the years, competitions have been important catalysts for progress in Artificial Intelligence. We describe one such competition, the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM). We discuss its significance in the context of today’s global market economy as well as AI research, the ways in which it breaks away from limiting assumptions made in prior work, and some of the...

The revenue management concept and techniques are applied to model the coordination of supply chain elements. The fundamental premise of this approach is synchronization of a group of business entities consist-ing of a manufacturer and multiple suppliers to achieve an optimal supply chain capacity plans. The output of the supply chain can be various products and thus it is measured in terms of ...

This paper is concerned with confidentiality of vertical information sharing in a supply chain consisting of one manufacturer in the upstream and two or more retailers in the downstream engaging in a Bertrand competition. Each retailer has some private information about the uncertain demand and may choose to disclose it to the manufacturer with or with out a confidentiality agreement. We consid...

We consider a supply chain with an upstream supplier who invests in innovation and a downstream manufacturer who sells to consumers. We study the impact of supply chain contracts with endogenous upstream innovation, focusing on three different contract scenarios: (i) a wholesale price contract, (ii) a quality-dependent wholesale price contract, and (iii) a revenuesharing contract. We confirm th...

To understand the joint impact of horizontal and vertical competition on supply chain intermediation, we propose a model of competition in a three-tier supply chain where intermediaries compete to mediate between competing retailers and capacity-constrained suppliers. We argue that in retailer-driven global supply chains it is more realistic to model the retailers as Stackelberg leaders, and sh...

Supply chain management is a popular trend for intensive global competition, and the performance analysis plays an important role in improving supply chain. This paper introduces the basic of the supply chain management and performance analysis. We emphasize the importance of building the performance analysis system to evaluate the entire supply chain. Via reviewing the characteristics of suppl...

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 ...

Supply chain management (SCM) deals with planning and coordinating activities such as material procurement, product assembly, and the distribution of manufactured products. This paper offers an agent-based solution as a potentially adequate approach for the automation of supply chain management. The greatest obstacle in SCM research is obtaining benchmark designed solutions since it is difficul...

In a decentralized supply chain, with long-term competition between independent retailers facing random demands and buying from a common supplier, how should wholesale and retail prices be specified, in an attempt to maximize supply-chain wide profits? We show what types of coordination mechanisms allow the decentralized supply chain to generate aggregate expected profits equal to the optimal p...

The competition among enterprises has gradually become the competition between supply chains, and it is more and more important for the cooperation among members of the supply chain to improve supply chain performance. Information sharing is an important way of cooperation among members of supply chain, which attaches great significance for the integration of the supply chain. With the developm...