Scheduling Commercial Videotapes in Broadcast Television

Authors:
Srinivas Bollapragada;Michael R. Bussieck;Suman Mallik
Affiliations:
GE Global Research Center, 1 Research Circle, Schenectady, New York 12309;GAMS Development Corporation, 1217 Potomac Street NW, Washington, DC 20007;Department of Business Administration, University of Illinois, 350 Wohlers Hall, 1206 South Sixth Street, Champaign, Illinois 61820
Venue:
Operations Research
Year:
2004

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Abstract

This paper, motivated by the experiences of a major U.S.-based broadcast television network, presents algorithms and heuristics to schedule commercial videotapes. Major advertisers purchase several slots to air commercials during a given time period on a broadcast network. We study the problem of scheduling advertiser's commercials in the slots it purchased when the same commercial is to be aired multiple times. Under such a situation, the advertisers typically want the airings of a commercial to be as evenly spaced as possible. Thus, our objective is to schedule a set of commercials in a set of available slots such that multiple airings of the same commercial are as evenly spaced as possible. A natural formulation of this problem is a mixed-integer program that can be solved using third-party solvers. We also develop a branch-and-bound algorithm based on a problem-specific bounding scheme. Both approaches fail to solve larger problem instances within a reasonable time frame. We present an alternative mixed-integer program that lends itself to an efficient solution. For solving even larger problems, we present multiple heuristics.