Development of a Genetic Algorithm for Advertising Time Allocation Problems

Commercial advertising is the main source of income for TV channels and allocation of advertising time slots for maximizing broadcasting revenues is the major problem faced by TV channel planners. In this paper, the problem of scheduling advertisements on prime-time of a TV channel is considered. The problem is formulated as a multi-unit combinatorial auction based mathematical model. This is an efficient mechanism for allocating the advertising time to advertisers in which the revenue of TV channel is maximized. However, still this problem is categorized as a NP-Complete problem. Therefore, a steady-state genetic algorithm is developed for finding a good or probably near-optimal solution, and is evaluated through a set of test problems for its robustness. Computational results reveal that the proposed algorithm is capable of obtaining high-quality solutions for the randomly generated real-sized test problems.