Scheduling of television commercials

Advertising income is a vital source of revenue for television stations. The arrangements made when customers purchase television advertising time should consider customer requirements, relevant laws and regulations, and the need to fill all available advertising time. This study presents an ant colony optimization (ACO) heuristic for establishing an effective and simple mechanism for solving the problem of scheduling television advertisements. The proposed mechanism was based on network structuring and recursive calculation methods. In the proposed approach, the scheduling mechanism and ACO heuristics are developed separately, improving the performance of the method in advertising scheduling by varying parameters or settings within the ACO heuristic and enabling the application to be flexibly modified by adjusting the scheduling criterion.