Optimization of real-world outdoor campaign allocations

In this paper, we investigate the outdoor campaign allocation problem (OCAP), which asks for the distribution of campaign items to billboards considering a number of constraints. In particular, for a metropolitan city with a large number of billboards, the problem becomes challenging. We propose a genetic algorithm-based method to allocate campaign items effectively, and we compare our results with those of nonlinear integer programming and greedy approaches. Real-world data sets are collected with the given constraints of the price class ratios of billboards located in Istanbul and the budgets of the given campaigns. The methods are evaluated in terms of the efficiency of the constructed plans and the construction time of the planning. The results reveal that the genetic algorithm-based approach gives close to optimal results in the shortest scheduling time for the OCAP, and it scales linearly with the increasing data sizes.