I am looking for a radio advertising scheduling algorithm / example / experience

Question

Tried doing a bit of research on the following with no luck. Thought I'd ask here in case someone has come across it before.

I help a volunteer-run radio station with their technology needs. One of the main things that have come up is they would like to schedule their advertising programmatically.

There are a lot of neat and complex rule engines out there for advertising, but all we need is something pretty simple (along with any experience that's worth thinking about).

I would like to write something in SQL if possible to deal with these entities. Ideally if someone has written something like this for other advertising mediums (web, etc.,) it would be really helpful.

Entities:

• Ads (consisting of a category, # of plays per day, start date, end date or permanent play)
• Ad Category (Restaurant, Health, Food store, etc.)

To over-simplify the problem, this will be a elegant sql statement. Getting there... :)

I would like to be able to generate a playlist per day using the above two entities where:

• No two ads in the same category are played within x number of ads of each other.
• (nice to have) high promotion ads can be pushed

At this time, there are no "ad slots" to fill. There is no "time of day" considerations.

We queue up the ads for the day and go through them between songs/shows, etc. We know how many per hour we have to fill, etc.

Any thoughts/ideas/links/examples? I'm going to keep on looking and hopefully come across something instead of learning it the long way.

Answer 1

Very interesting question, SMO. Right now it looks like a constraint programming problem because you aren't looking for an optimal solution, just one that satisfies all the constraints you have specified. In response to those who wanted to close the question, I'd say they need to check out constraint programming a bit. It's far closer to stackoverflow that any operations research sites.

Look into constraint programming and scheduling - I'll bet you'll find an analogous problem toot sweet !

Keep us posted on your progress, please.