New tabu search heuristic in scheduling earth observation satellites

2013 Eighth International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications

et al. 2013

Satellite scheduling is a family of problems that arise in satellite mission planning of communications of spacecrafts with ground stations. The problems of this family can be classi ed under time window scheduling given that the communication between the ground stations and spacecrafts can only be done during some speci ed time window. This later feature, together with the fact that different users may request communications with spacecrafts in the same time window, make the problems highly constrained and hard to solve to optimality. Therefore, these problems are solved in practice through heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches, which are in general ef cient not only for small to moderate size but also for large size instances of the problem. While such methods do not provide any guarantee about optimality of solutions, in most cases they do provide high quality solutions that meet expected requirements of users. In this paper we consider the use of heuristic and meta-heuristic methods for solving satellite scheduling problems. We consider some local search methods (Hill Climbing, Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search) and population based methods (Genetic Algorithms and their variants). We show the instantiation of these methods for solving the case of Ground Station Scheduling, which is one of the most used variants of the satellite scheduling. Some computation results are presented for Tabu Search method.

Section: Resolution Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local Search and Genetic Algorithms for Satellite Scheduling Problems

Koliçi

2013 Eighth International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications

et al. 2013

“…Other heuristics algorithms can be found in the literature for the problem Genitor [3], Branch-and-Bound Algorithm [3], Graph Colouring [10], Tabu Search [7], Hill Climbing [3].…”

Section: Problem Instancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using STK Toolkit for Evaluating a GA Base Algorithm for Ground Station Scheduling

2013 Seventh International Conference on Complex, Intelligent, and Software Intensive Systems

Barolli

et al. 2013

The satellite scheduling and its version of ground station scheduling are increasingly attracting the attention of researchers from aerospace and optimization domain. While in the recent past satellite mission arise from large aero-spacial agencies, nowadays even smaller companies are interested in satellite missions for basic tasks such as telemetry, imaging, remote sensing, etc. The ground station scheduling problem consists in computing an optimal planning of communications between satellites or spacecraft (SC) and operations teams of Ground Station (GS). The problem is highly complex and multi-objective and in its general formulation has been shown NP-hard. Therefore, its resolution is tackled by heuristic and meta-heuristic methods. Although heuristic and meta-heuristic methods are well understood, their evaluation for specific problems, like ground station scheduling, remain a challenge. The design and development of benchmarks of instances is thus needful to evaluate such methods and also to provide the community with means to reproduce the experimental study for the same benchmark under the same or different parameter setting. In this paper, we present an XML-based benchmark of instances for the ground station scheduling generated with the STK simulation toolkit. Then we show the experimental evaluation of a Basic Genetic Algorithm using the benchmark.

“…Most formulations of both fixed time scheduling and variable time scheduling have been shown NP-hard and thus their resolution is addressed through heuristic and meta-heuristic methods [8][9][10]. In this paper we present a local search algorithm, namely, a Hill Climbing algorithm, for solving the Ground Station Scheduling.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Hill Climbing Algorithm for Ground Station Scheduling

Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering

Barolli

et al. 2013

Ground Station Scheduling arises in satellite mission planning and belongs to scheduling family with time windows. It is know for its high computational complexity and hardness to solve to optimality. In fact, in some cases it is even hard to find a feasible solution that satisfies all user requirements and resource constraints. In this paper we present a Hill Climbing (HC) algorithm for the problem, which is a fast local search algorithm. Despite of being a simple search method, HC showed a good performance for small size instance while could not cope with medium and large size instances. The Satellite Toolkit is used for its experimental study and performance evaluation.