Distributed Feedback Control for Decision Making on Supply Chains
Decision makers on supply chains face an uncertain, dynamic, and strategic multiagent environment. We report on Deep Maize, an agent we designed to participate in the 2003 Trading Agent Competition Supply Chain Management (TAC/SCM) game. Our design employs an idealized equilibrium analysis of the SCM game to factor out the strategic aspects of the environment and to define an expected profitable zone of operation. Deep Maize applies distributed feedback control to coordinate its separate functional modules and maintain its environment in the desired zone, despite the uncertainty and dynamism. We evaluate our design with results from the TAC/SCM tournament as well as from controlled experiments conducted after the competition.