A demand-driven approach for a multi-agent system in Supply Chain Management

This paper presents the architecture of a multi-agent decision support system for Supply Chain Management (SCM) which has been designed to compete in the TAC SCM game. The behaviour of the system is demand-driven and the agents plan, predict, and react dynamically to changes in the market. The main strength of the system lies in the ability of the Demand agent to predict customer winning bid prices - the highest prices the agent can offer customers and still obtain their orders. This paper investigates the effect of the ability to predict customer order prices on the overall performance of the system. Four strategies are proposed and compared for predicting such prices. The experimental results reveal which strategies are better and show that there is a correlation between the accuracy of the models' predictions and the overall system performance: the more accurate the prediction of customer order prices, the higher the profit. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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 and support a research agenda. We describe the structure of decision processes in the MinneTAC trading agent, focusing on the use of evaluators – configurable, composable modules for data analysis 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 processes can be modified in useful ways by changing evaluator configurations. To put this work in context, we also 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).autonomous trading agent;decision processes

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 and support a research agenda. We describe the structure of decision processes in the MinneTAC trading agent, focusing on the use of evaluators – configurable, composable modules for data analysis 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 processes can be modified in useful ways by changing evaluator configurations. To put this work in context, we also 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)

SW for Automatic Analysis and Modeling of Myocardium from MOLLI Sequence

Tato diplomová práce se zabývá návrhem a implementací algoritmu pro segmentaci srdečních struktur z MOLLI sekvencí. Pro tuto segmentaci byla využita metoda aktivních kontur založena na lokální Gaussovské distribuci. Tato metoda byla vybrána na základě studia vědeckých prací obsažených v teoretické části. Díky této segmentaci je možné na výsledném binárním modelu měřit parametry srdeční struktury. Dále teoretická část obsahuje poznatky o snímání srdce pomocí MRI a MOLLI sekvencích. Praktická část popisuje jednotlivé kroky předzpracování, segmentace a měření parametrů dané struktury. Měřenými parametry jsou délka, šířka, obsah v řezu a tloušťka srdeční svaloviny levé komory. Závěrem této práce je návrh graficko-uživatelského rozhraní, které umožňuje jednoduchou a intuitivní segmentaci. Součástí diplomové práce je i testování robustnosti segmentace porovnáním výsledků segmentace s manuálními konturami vytvořenými expertem. Na základě testování podobnosti s manuálními konturami pomocí DICE koeficientu, střední kvadratické chyby a koeficientu korelace bylo provedeno vyhodnocení robustnosti a úspěšnosti segmentace.This diploma thesis deals with design and implementation of algorithm for segmentation of heart structures from MOLLI sequences. The active contour method based on the local Gaussian distribution was used for this segmentation. This method was chosen based on the study of scientific papers contained in the theoretical part. Thanks to this segmentation, it is possible to measure the cardiac structure parameters in the resulting binary model. Furthermore, the theoretical part contains knowledge about heart sensing using MRI and MOLLI sequences. The practical part describes the individual steps of preprocessing, segmentation and measurement of parameters of the given structure. The measured parameters are length, width, cavity content in the incision and thickness of the left ventricular heart muscle. The conclusion of this work is design of graphical user interface, which allows simple and intuitive segmentation. Part of the thesis is also testing segmentation robustness by comparing segmentation results with manual contours created by an expert. Based on testing of similarity to manual contours using DICE coefficient, mean quadratic error and correlation coefficient, robustness and success of segmentation were evaluated.450 - Katedra kybernetiky a biomedicínského inženýrstvívelmi dobř

Identifying and forecasting economic regimes in TAC SCM

We present methods for an autonomous agent to identify dominant market conditions, such as over-supply or scarcity, and to forecast market changes. We show that market conditions can be characterized by distinguishable statistical patterns that can be learned from historic data and used, together with realtime observable information, to identify the current market regime and to forecast market changes. We use a Gaussian Mixture Model to represent the probabilities of market prices and, by clustering these probabilities, we identify different economic regimes. We show that the regimes so identified have properties that correlate with market factors that are not directly observable. We then present methods to predict regime changes. We validate our methods by presenting experimental results obtained with data from the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management