The Trading Agent Competition (TAC) has become a tradition since its beginning in 2000. The competition seeks to study automatic trading strategies, by focusing the research community on the development of agent-based solutions to a common trading scenario. The fourth edition of this competition, which took place in August 2003, proposed a novel scenario: the supply-chain game. This scenario sought to focus research on the use of automatic agents in the context of dynamic supply-chain management.

A short overview is provided in this paper of this supply-chain game, proposed for TAC-03, and details the main rules of the game. It provides pointers to several Web sites for more comprehensive information on the competition. The main Web site for the 2003 game is www.sics.se/tac/.