Web Ad-Slot Offline Scheduling Using an Ant Colony Algorithm

Abstract

Online advertisements (ads) placed at different positions on a web page get different number of 'hits' depending on the position and the time the ad occupies a particular position of advertisement on the web page.  The management of online advertisement slots (ad-slots) on a web page is a dynamic problem and various derivative free optimization techniques could be employed for solving it. This paper presents an ant colony based algorithm for assigning bidders to click generating ad-slots.  The objective is to maximize the profit obtained from clicks on ads, under some budget constraints for bidders and some scheduling constraints on the slots. A few instances of results for ads' allocation and bidding have been presented in the paper and demonstrate the approach.