The original idea of TAGA comes from the Trading Agent Competition ( TAC ). TAC is a test bed for intelligent software agents that interact through simultaneous auctions. TAC trading agents operate within a travel shopping scenario, buying and selling goods to best serve their given travel clients. TAC scores the results based on the client's preferences for trips assembled, and net expenditures in the travel markets. TAC is designed to promote and encourage high quality research into the trading agent problem and proven to be successful. We (Umbctac team) joined the past three-year’s TAC games, ranking 4th in both 2000 and 2002. To learn more about TAC, please visit http://www.sics.se/tac/.
TAC game rules had been improved during three-year’s competitions, however, the assumptions and approach of TAC limit its usefulness as a realistic test bed for agents and automating commerce. TAC uses centralized auctions as the sole mechanism for service discovery, communication, coordination, commitment, and control among the participating software agents. The agents communicate with each other through socket interface, exchanging pre-defined string message. The abstractness and simplicity of the TAC approach helped to launch it as a research vehicle, but are now perceived as a limiting factor. So we developed the TAGA game based on TAC with more focuses on distributed and FIPA compliant features.
last update 01/16/2003