Performance bounds of algorithms for scheduling advertisements on a web page

  • Authors:

  • Milind Dawande;Subodha Kumar;Chelliah Sriskandarajah

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Texas, Dallas, TX IBM T. J. Watson Center, NY;University of Washington, Seattle, WA;University of Texas, Dallas, TX

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Scheduling
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Consider a set of n advertisements (hereafter called "ads") A = {A1,...,An} competing to be placed in a planning horizon which is divided into N time intervals called slots. An ad Ai is specified by its size si and frequency wi. The size si represents the amount of space the ad occupies in a slot. Ad Ai is said to be scheduled if exactly wi copies of Ai are placed in the slots subject to the restriction that a slot contains at most one copy of an ad. In this paper, we consider 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 S for all slots. The total size of the ads placed in a slot cannot exceed S. The objective is to find a feasible schedule A' ⊆ A of ads such that the total occupied slot space ΣAi∈A WiSi is maximized. We examine the complexity status of both problems and provide heuristics with performance guarantees.