Set it and forget it: utility-based scheduling for public displays

The pervasiveness of public displays is prompting an increased need for “fresh” content to be shown, that is highly engaging and useful to passerbys. As such, live or time-sensitive content is often shown in conjunction with “traditional” static content, which creates scheduling challenges. In this work, we propose a utility-based framework that can be used to represent the usefulness of a content item over time. We develop a novel scheduling algorithm for handling live and non-live content on public displays using our utility-based framework. We experimentally evaluate our proposed algorithm against a number of alternatives under a variety of workloads; the results show that our algorithm performs well on the proposed metrics. Additional experimental evaluation shows that our utility-based framework can handle changes in priorities and deadlines of content items, without requiring any involvement by the display owner beyond the initial setup.