Banner Advertisements Scheduling to Maximize Space Utilization

 One of the commercial Internet applications is banner advertisement, which is also the major source of income for portal websites. Limited research works address the issues of efficiently scheduling advertisement requests into available advertisement banners in view of profitably. This paper proposes a new model for scheduling banner advertisements that more closely resembles the Internet business world. In the proposed model, we apply a feasible time window to each candidate order, and schedule advertisements into various predefined banner spaces on the webpage. This approach allows different pricing strategies according to banner types and is contrary to previous research models that schedule and price by banner space sharing. Each order for ad space will demand a certain frequency for each type of banner. The goal is to select and schedule requests to achieve the maximum ad capacity utilization. We first give a mathematical formulation to formally describe the problem. Due to the computational complexity of the studied problem, we seek to produce approximate solutions in a reasonable time. A three-phase heuristic is developed to cope with this problem. In addition, an upper bound on profits is developed. Computational experiments are designed to examine the performance of the heuristic. Statistics from the experiments reveal that the heuristic can successfully fill up to 97% of ad spaces.