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Solving the Agile Earth Observation Satellite Scheduling Problem with CP and Local Search

Authors Valentin Antuori, Damien T. Wojtowicz, Emmanuel Hebrard

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computing methodologies → Planning and scheduling
  • Applied computing → Operations research
Keywords
  • Local Search
  • Greedy Algorithms
  • Aerospace Applications

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Abstract

The increasing hunger for remote sensing data fuels a boom in satellite imagery, leading to larger agile Earth observation satellite (AEOS) constellations. Therefore, instances of the AEOS scheduling problem (AEOSSP) has become harder to solve. As most existing approaches to solve AEOSSP are designed for a single spacecraft or smaller constellations in mind, they are not tailored to the need of our industrial partner that is about to launch a constellation of 20 AEOSs. Hence, we designed a local search solver able to schedule observations and downloads at such a scale. It relies on solving a series of sub-problems as travelling salesman problem with time windows (TSPTW), first greedily, then using a CP-SAT exact solver in order to find a solution when the greedy insertion fails. Lastly, it schedules downloads and enforces memory constraints with greedy algorithms. Experiments were carried out on instances from the literature as well as generated instances from a simulator we designed. Our experiments show that using CP to solve the sub-problem significantly improve the solutions, and overall our method is slightly better than state-of-the-art approaches.

Cite As Get BibTex

Valentin Antuori, Damien T. Wojtowicz, and Emmanuel Hebrard. Solving the Agile Earth Observation Satellite Scheduling Problem with CP and Local Search. In 31st International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 340, pp. 3:1-3:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2025.3

Author Details

Valentin Antuori
  • LAAS - CNRS, Toulouse, France
Damien T. Wojtowicz
  • LAAS - CNRS, Toulouse, France
Emmanuel Hebrard
  • LAAS - CNRS, Toulouse, France

Funding

France Relance grant (project JAPETUS)

Supplementary Materials

References

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