[rules-users] Subject: Drools Planner - Design Suggestions

[Gabor Szokoli]

On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 1:43 PM, ge0ffrey <ge0ffrey.spam at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I agree on the normal constraints with vincent. The 100% sold is like nurses
> falling sick.
> You cannot plan it in advance.

I could be misunderstanding the domain, but I though that's exactly
what he wants the most :-)
And the historical data is not a precise prediction of how traffic
will turn out this week, just a clue.
No use tailoring a tight plan to imprecise data.

What I'd do is try to guesstimate the weekly amount of "prime time",
when ads are likely to sell out within the hour.
Reserve enough of the highest-paying ads, serve them up during actual
high traffic periods in the order of profitability.

In general, I'd partition the week into traffic buckets (likely to
sell out 100%: 10 hours a week. between 99-80%: 20 hours, 79-60%: 40
hours, etc), with corresponding ad pools. You size the pools based on
historical data (the amount of ads you are likely to need to schedule
during such traffic in a week) and fill up based on profitability (I
guess pay/click * click probability)
Then as the week goes by, you can simply pick any ad from the pool
that belongs to the currently observable traffic rate, obeying other
placement rules, borrowing from neighboring pools if needed.

Depending on the CPU power you have available, you can make corrective
adjustments to the pools either periodically or on the fly.


The problem I see is skewing your click probability statistics by
consistently placing certain ads in certain periods. You may need to
place some ads totally randomly to have a more objective view.


Hard to tell what your next step should be: Building in-house
expertise is probably the best long term investment, but how much you
must invest depends heavily on where your guys are now.


Happy New Year!

Gabor