Utility-based scheduling for in-taxi video advertising systems

One brand new medium of promoting various products and information is to introduce video advertisements to taxis, leading to many interesting business models with potential profits in the digital advertising market. In in-taxi video advertising systems, each advertisement is characterized by a specified play count requirement and its contract period. The system should finish playing the contractual advertisements by the end of their contract periods to meet play count requirements. However, since the limited carrying time provided by all operating taxis is shared among multiple advertisements, unfair assignment of play counts may happen if we play advertisements in an inappropriate order during carrying services: Some advertisements may be allocated a considerable number of play counts at the cost of narrowing others. In this paper, we apply the concept of utility function to represent the level of satisfaction of an advertiser for various advertisements, and propose an algorithm to schedule the display order of advertisements with fairness concern such that the total utility is maximized. We conduct a series of experiments to emulate the operations of the system in the real world with real data. The results show that our proposed scheme has significant superiority in terms of total utility and fairness for all advertisements in the system.