Flexible decision control in an autonomous trading agent

An autonomous trading agent is a complex piece of software that must operate in a competitive economic environment. We report on results of an informal survey of agent design approaches among the competitors in the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM). We then describe and evaluate the design of the MinneTAC trading agent, a research tool that competes in TAC SCM. We focus on the use of evaluators – configurable, composable modules for data analysis, modeling, and prediction that are chained together at runtime to support agent decision-making. Through a set of examples, we show how this structure supports sales and procurement decisions, and how those decision process can be modified in useful ways by changing evaluator configurations