Scheduling Commercial Videotapes in Broadcast Television

Srinivas Bollapragada (), Michael R. Bussieck () and Suman Mallik ()
Additional contact information
Srinivas Bollapragada: GE Global Research Center, 1 Research Circle, Schenectady, New York 12309
Michael R. Bussieck: GAMS Development Corporation, 1217 Potomac Street NW, Washington, DC 20007
Suman Mallik: Department of Business Administration, University of Illinois, 350 Wohlers Hall, 1206 South Sixth Street, Champaign, Illinois 61820

Operations Research, 2004, vol. 52, issue 5, 679-689

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.

Keywords: scheduling; mixed-integer programming; heuristics; broadcast television (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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