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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. https://transitscreen.com

  2. For example, https://screen.cloud

  3. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_slack_time_scheduling

  4. https://truetime.portauthority.org/bustime/home.jsp

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Funding

This work is part of the PittSmartLiving project which is supported by NSF award CNS-1739413.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260-9161, USA

    Kristi Bushman & Alexandros Labrinidis

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  1. Kristi Bushman
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  2. Alexandros Labrinidis
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Correspondence to Kristi Bushman.

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Bushman, K., Labrinidis, A. Set it and forget it: utility-based scheduling for public displays. Pers Ubiquit Comput 26, 781–794 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-020-01423-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-020-01423-1

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