Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

We provide a case study for the Autonomous Economic Agent (AEA) framework; a toolkit for the development and deployment of autonomous agents with a focus on economic activities. The use case is the trading agent competition (TAC). It is a competition between autonomous agents with customisable strategies and market parameters. The competition is facilitated by the AEA framework’s native support for decentralised ledger technologies, i.e. permissionless blockchains and smart contract functionality, for immutable transaction recording and trade settlement. We provide an open-source implementation, study the result of the competitions we ran, and compare it to theoretical results in the economics literature. We conclude by discussing its real-world applications in crypto-currency, digital assets and token trading.