Optimizing Web Newspaper Layout Using Simulated Annealing

This paper presents a new approach to the pagination problem. This problem has traditionally been solved ooine for a variety of applications like the pagination of Yellow Pages or newspapers, but since these services have appeared in Internet, a new approach is needed to solve the problem in real time. This paper is concerned with the problem of paginating a selection of articles from web newspapers that match a query sent to a personalized news site by a user. The result should look like a real newspaper and adapt to the client's computer connguration (font faces and sizes, screen size and resolution, etc.). A combinatorial approach based on Simulated Annealing and written in JavaScript is proposed to solve the problem online in the client's computer. Experiments show that the GA achieves real time layout optimization for up to 50 articles.