Uncertain personal advertisement allocation for Mobile TV

In this paper we consider the problem of allocating personal TV advertisements when the viewers' viewing capacities are uncertain. We focus on the Mobile TV medium as a personal platform taking into account special constraints that are motivated by the TV medium. Since the problem is NP-Hard, we present a sequential solution procedure and propose several heuristic algorithms for solving it. Through computational experiments on different scenarios of uncertainty, the performances of these heuristics were compared to the performance in the deterministic case where the actual viewing capacities are known in advance. The performance of these heuristics was close to that of the deterministic even for scenarios where uncertainty was very high while the Com-binedRatingRobust algorithm seems to be the best for most scenarios. In general, the heuristic algorithms that consider uncertainty in advance seem to be preferable over those that only adapt to it after it has been discovered. Though this paper is oriented for Mobile TV, the proposed algorithms are suitable for other personal push-advertisement methods such as SMS (Short Message Service) and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service).