A mathematical multi-objective optimization model and metaheuristic algorithm for effective advertising in the social internet of things

The integration of social networks with the Internet of Things (IoT) has been explored in recent research, giving rise to the Social Internet of Things (SIoT). One promising application of SIoT is viral marketing, which plays a critical role in modern advertising. However, current solutions proposed for viral marketing are often impractical in real-world scenarios, and there has been limited investigation into viral marketing within the context of SIoT. To address this issue, we present a multi-objective integer linear programming model named ILP-ASoT that facilitates advertising through SIoT. Our approach introduces two realistic parameters: the node sociality rate and the node appropriateness rate as an advertising destination. By balancing the cost of selecting a seed set with the number of users who receive the advertisement, our model offers an appropriate trade-off. Since this is proven as an NP-hard problem, A PSO-based metaheuristic algorithm is proposed to provide near-optimal solutions for advertising in SIoT, called PSO-ASoT. Through simulations, we show that our PSO-ASoT algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in several metrics, such as influence spread, advertising cost, and duplicated advertising rate.