TAC-03 -- A Supply-Chain Trading Competition

Customers issue requests for quotes and select from quotes submitted by the PC assemblers, based on delivery dates and prices. In today's global economy, of components: (1) central processing units effective supply-chain management is vital (CPUs), (2) motherboards, (3) memory units, to the competitiveness of manufacturing enterprises and (4) disk drives. It features a variety of components because it directly impacts their ability of each type (for example, different to meet changing market demands in a timely CPUs, different motherboards). With annual worldwide comes in the form of requests for quotes supply-chain transactions in the trillions for different types of PCs, each requiring a different of dollars, the potential impact of performance combination of components. Although today's The PC assembly agents compete over a relatively supply chains are essentially static, relying long period of time during which customer on long-term relationships among key demand and availability of supplies trading partners, more flexible and dynamic varies according to predefined stochastic distributions practices offer the prospect of better matches (figure 1).