Scheduling an Agile Multipayload Earth-Observing Satellite

A highly integrated Earth-observing satellite can possess several maneuverable payloads to perform different missions simultaneously, which brings some challenges to the method of task scheduling. This paper addresses the selection and scheduling problem of an agile satellite with several independently maneuverable optical payloads. Some differences compared to the traditional scheduling problem of agile satellites are presented and considered in a constrained optimization model. A two-stage method is proposed to accomplish the scheduling of the satellite and payloads in different stages. Clusters are generated from preprocessed tasks by a clique partition algorithm, and their centers are used to calculate the pointing direction of the satellite in the first stage. A multiobjective local search algorithm is introduced to schedule tasks in each selected cluster in the second stage. Considering the time-dependent property of the transition time, the problem of determining the start observation time is transformed into linear programming in a proposed insertion operator that guarantees the feasibility of generated solutions. Two types of instances are created and tested to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and some analyses are conducted based on the experimental results.