Abstract
Many web sites (e.g., Hotmail, Yahoo, Google) provide free services to the users while generating revenues from advertising. Advertising revenue is, therefore, critical for these sites. This in turn raises the question, how should ads at a web site be scheduled in a planning horizon to maximize revenue. Consider a set of ads competing to be placed in a planning horizon that is divided into time intervals called slots. An ad is specified by its size and display frequency. The size represents the amount of space the ad occupies in a slot. An ad is said to be scheduled if a pre-specified number of copies of that ad are placed in the slots subject to the restriction that a slot contains at most one copy of an ad. In this chapter, we present two problems. The MINSPACE problem minimizes the maximum fullness among all slots in a feasible schedule where the fullness of a slot is the sum of the sizes of ads assigned to the slot. For the MAXSPACE problem, in addition, we are given a common maximum fullness for all slots. The total size of the ads placed in a slot cannot exceed that common maximum fullness. The objective is to find a feasible schedule of ads such that the total occupied slot space is maximized. We examine the complexity status of both problems and present heuristics with performance guarantees. For the MAXSPACE problem, we also present a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA).
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Kumar, S. (2016). Scheduling Advertisements on a Web Page. In: Optimization Issues in Web and Mobile Advertising. SpringerBriefs in Operations Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18645-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18645-0_3
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