This is the specification for the Power Trading Agent Competition for 2012 (Power TAC 2012). Power TAC is a competitive simulation that models a “liberalized” retail electrical energy market, where competing business entities or “brokers” offer energy services to customers through tariff...

An effective Decision Support System (DSS) should help its users improve decision-making in complex, information-rich, environments. We present a feature gap analysis that shows that current decision support technologies lack important qualities for a new generation of agile business models that...

We show how an autonomous agent can use observable market conditions to characterize the microeconomic situation of the market and predict future market trends. The agent can use this information to make both tactical decisions, such as pricing, and strategic decisions, such as product mix and...

This is the specification for the Power Trading Agent Competition for 2013 (Power TAC 2013). Power TAC is a competitive simulation that models a “liberalized” retail electrical energy market, where competing business entities or “brokers” offer energy services to customers through tariff...

We present a computational approach that autonomous software agents can adopt to make tactical decisions, such as product pricing, and strategic decisions, such as product mix and production planning, to maximize profit in markets with supply and demand uncertainties. Using a combination of...

The energy sector will undergo fundamental changes over the next ten years. Prices for fossil energy resources are continuously increasing, there is an urgent need to reduce CO2 emissions, and the United States and European Union are strongly motivated to become more independent from foreign...

We propose an evolutionary approach for studying the dynamics of interaction of strategic agents that interact in a marketplace. The goal is to learn which agent strategies are most suited by observing the distribution of the agents that survive in the market over extended periods of time. We...

In this case the Dutch Flower Auctions (DFA) are discussed. The DFA are part of the supply network in which flowers are produced, stocked, and then sold through either mediation or auctioning. This case focuses on the buyers’ and auctioneers’ positions when flowers are traded through...

This is the specification for the Power Trading Agent Competition for 2011 (Power TAC 2011). Agents are simulations of electrical power brokers, who must compete with each other for both power production and consumption, and manage their portfolios.

Information systems have revolutionized the provisioning of decision-relevant information, and decision support tools have improved human decisions in many domains. Autonomous decision- making, on the other hand, remains hampered by systems’ inability to faithfully capture human preferences....