Abstract

Internet advertising is a relatively new area where feedback control has become critically important for scalable optimization. But using feedback control presents new challenges, one being the discontinuous nature of the input-output relationship of the plant to control. In this paper we propose an actuator and control algorithm for the specific objective of scalable event rate control in online advertising. The actuator makes the input-output relationship of the plant effectively continuous and with adjustable plant gain, and the feedback controller implements a PI controller to regulate the campaign level event rate to stay at or above a reference value.