Web Ad-Slot Offline Scheduling Using an Ant Colony Algorithm

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.