Distributed feedback control for decision making on supply chains

Abstract

Decision makers on supply chains face an uncertain, dy-namic, 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 equi-librium analysis of the SCM game to factor out the strategic aspects of the environment and to define an expected prof-itable zone of operation. Deep Maize applies distributed feed-back control to coordinate its separate functional modules and maintain its environment in the desired zone, despite the un-certainty and dynamism. We evaluate our design with results from the TAC/SCM tournament as well as from controlled experiments conducted after the competition.