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ICMAS-00 Trading Agent Competition
8 July 2000
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
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Trading in electronic markets is increasingly becoming both a commonplace
economic activity and a topic of special interest within the AI, Electronic
Commerce, and Multiagent Systems (MAS) research communities. Inspired by
the success of competitions in various other AI realms, we announce the
ICMAS-00 Trading Agent Competition, to be held in conjunction with a
special purpose workshop at the Fourth International Conference on
Multiagent Systems (ICMAS-00), in Boston in July 2000. This event is
designed to spur research on common problems, promote definitions of
benchmarks and standard problem descriptions, and showcase current
technologies.
The competition will pit software agents--developed by research groups,
students, and others from all over the world--against each other in a
challenging market game. The software agents will represent travel
coordinators whose goal is to arrange travel packages for clients. These
travel packages consist of flights, hotel rooms, and tickets to
entertainment events, all of which the agents buy (and, in the case of event
tickets, sell) in electronic auctions. The market game has been specially
designed to present agents with difficult decision problems and admit a
wide variety of potential bidding strategies.
The competition will be hosted on a version of the Michigan Internet
AuctionBot that has been outfitted with features to facilitate and control
distributed market games. Software agents communicate with the AuctionBot
via a TCP-based agent programming interface. Simple example agents are
available in a variety of platforms and programming languages.
The final round of the competition will be held at the ICMAS-00 TAC workshop on
8 July 2000. Preliminary rounds may be necessary. We anticipate the
following schedule for contest related events:
15 April 2000 Entrants registration (intent to participate) due.
17 June 2000 Preliminary rounds begin, if necessary.
7 July 2000 TAC contest and workshop, Boston MA.
More information can be found at http://tac.eecs.umich.edu/
We encourage you to circulate this announcement to anyone who may be
interested in participating. Questions may be directed to
TAC.support@umich.edu.
-- Pete
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Peter Wurman wurman@csc.ncsu.edu
Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University
http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/wurman/
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