Empirical Game-Theoretic Analysis of the TAC Supply Chain Game
PR Jordan, C Kiekintveld, and MP Wellman
In Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 1188–1195, May 2007.
Copyright (c) 2007, IFAAMAS. This is the author's version of the work.
It is posted here by permission of ACM for personal use, not for redistribution.
Download
Abstract
The TAC Supply Chain Management (TAC/SCM) game presents a
challenging dynamic environment for autonomous decision-making
in a salient application domain. Strategic interactions complicate
the analysis of games such as TAC/SCM, since the effectiveness of
a given strategy depends on the strategies played by other agents
on the supply chain. The TAC tournament generates results from
one particular path of combinations, and success in the tournament
is rightly regarded as evidence for agent quality. Such results along
with post-competition controlled experiments provide useful evaluations
of novel techniques employed in the game. We argue that
a broader game-theoretic analysis framework can provide a firmer
foundation for choice of experimental contexts. Exploiting a repository
of agents from the 2005 and 2006 TAC/SCM tournaments,
we demonstrate an empirical game-theoretic methodology based
on extensive simulation and careful measurement. Our analysis of
agents from TAC-05 reveals interesting interactions not seen in the
tournament. Extending the analysis to TAC-06 enables us to measure
progress from year-to-year, and generates a candidate empirical
equilibrium among the best known strategies. We use this equilibrium
as a stable background population for comparing relative
performance of the 2006 agents, yielding insights complementing
the tournament results.
