Reward Factor-Based Multiple Agile Satellites Scheduling With Energy and Memory Constraints

Earth observing satellites (EOS) orbit around the earth to perform observation tasks specified by users. The additional maneuverability resulting from higher degrees of freedom than nonagile EOS (N-AEOS) provides agile EOS (AEOS) a significantly larger visible time window to complete the tasks. As a consequence, the task scheduling for AEOS is much more computationally complex than N-AEOS. In this article, a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem is formulated to find a near-optimal task allocation for a realistic AEOS scheduling problem. The satellite resources, such as energy and memory constraints, are considered in this problem. A reward factor is used to address the requirement of multiple scans in order to complete a task. A probability factor is also taken into consideration to incorporate the uncertainty of successful scans due to external factors, such as cloud coverage. An elitist mixed coded genetic algorithm-based satellite scheduling (EMCGA-SS) algorithm is proposed to solve the formulated problem. EMCGA-SS is extended to elitist mixed coded hybrid genetic algorithm-based satellite scheduling by combining a hill-climber mechanism in order to have better initialization. Experimental results to illustrate the performance of the algorithms and a comparison with some widely used methodologies are also presented.