Demo: Making Lottery-based Scheduling Decisions Visible

Current approaches to the problem of scheduling content onto public displays often manage stakeholder requirements by providing complex constraint-based schedules in which each item is governed by a set of playback restrictions based on time, date, context, etc. However, in most cases even once constraints have been resolved, multiple content items can remain eligible for playback. To date, little consideration has been given to this stage of the scheduling process.

We have developed a lottery-based scheduling system designed specifically for making scheduling decisions at the point at which multiple items are eligible for playback. By allocating each content item a different proportion of lottery tickets, the scheduler can balance non-restrictive requirements (e.g. preferences for new content, longer content, content from a particular source) -- a random draw then determines the next item to be shown, resulting in a probabilistic but non-deterministic schedule. In this demonstration we show the use of a lottery-scheduler as part of a deployed digital signage platform, and use a display-based visualisation to make the the ticket allocation process and drawing visible to the user.