www.elsevier.com/locate/comnet Optimization of web newspaper layout in real time

The web newspaper pagination problem consists in optimizing the layout of a set of articles extracted from several web newspapers and sending it to the user as the result of a previous query. This layout should be as similar as possible to that of real newspapers and should be adapted to the user's web browser con®guration in real time. Previous approaches to the problem took rather a long time or su€ered the constraint of all the articles having the same width. This paper presents an improved approach based on simulated annealing �SA) that solves the problem online, adapts itself to the client's computer con®guration and also supports articles with di€erent widths, so that long articles can now be laid out in more than one column, producing a squarer shape. With this new feature, the layouts obtained look more like a real newspaper, where important or long articles occupy more than one column. Ó 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved