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                                    Seminar


       Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management,

                    The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title:
On a Media Planning Model for Inserting Commercials on Breaks

Speaker:
Professsor J.B.G. Frenk
Econometric Institute
Erasmus university

Date : April 19, 2006 (Wednesday)

Time : 5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Venue : Room 513, William M.W. Mong Engineering Building

(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2), CUHK

Abstract:
In this talk we will discuss ongoing research on a media planning model
describing the insertion of TV commercials into breaks. In practice a
simplified model is already in use at PLS (a marketing consultancy company)
and the main goal of the research is to model the problem in more detail and
improve the speed of obtaining good solutions. After introducing the nonlinear
objective function and the restrictions we introduce the optimization model
and discuss several of its properties. It turns out for special so-called
advertising response curves that a upper bound relaxation of the model reduces
to a large scale binary linear integer programming problem, while a lower
bound relaxation reduces to a binary maximization problem with linear
constraints and a discrete concave objective function. Since the research is
still in progress and hence many problems are open a part of the talk will be
devoted to research questions.

Bio:
Hans Frenk serves on the faculty of the Econometric Institute of the Erasmus
university in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His Ph.d thesis started in
stochastic processes (renewal theory and regenerative processes) and through
the years he also got interested in optimization and convex analysis. At the
moment his research is in stochastic models, optimization theory,
convex/quasi-convex analysis and the application of stochastic and
deterministic techniques to problems in Management Science and Engineering. He
published both in theoretical and applied journals and taught a variety of
different topics to economics and econometrics students (statistics,
simulation, stochastic processes, integer programming, linear programming,
modeling and applications of Operations Research to Management Science).

Note : Cookies and drinks will be available at 4:45 pm.

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