CMU-ISRI-07-123
Institute for Software Research
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University



CMU-ISRI-07-123

The 2007 Procurement Challenge:
A Competition to Evaluate Mixed Procurement Strategies

Alberto Sardinha, Michael Benisch, Norman Sadeh
Ramprasad Ravichandran, Vedran Podobnik*, Mihai Stan**

November 2007

CMU-ISRI-07-123.pdf


Keywords: Autonomous agent, electronic commerce, trading agent


This article discusses the design of the 2007 "Supply Chain Management - Procurement Challenge"' (SCM-PC), a competition designed by the first three authors to evaluate the performance of mixed procurement strategies. Specifically, the SCM-PC Challenge revolves around a PC assembly scenario, where trading agents developed by different teams compete for components required to assemble different types of PCs. The Challenge requires the agents to manage supply chain risk through combinations of long-term, quantity-flexible procurement contracts and one-off procurement contracts for different components. Collectively the authors represent the top three entries in the 2007 Procurement Challenge. They present the strategies their teams developed for the competition, compare their performances, and discuss lessons learned from the competition.

23 pages

*University of Zagreb, Croatia
**University "Politehnica" of Bucharest, Romania


Return to: SCS Technical Report Collection
School of Computer Science homepage

This page maintained by reports@cs.cmu.edu