New tabu search heuristic in scheduling earth observation satellites

Scheduling system of low earth orbit (LEO) satellite operations is one of the important tasks performed in satellites. Satellite specific constraints, satellite priorities, priorities of certain payload and special operations, as well as visibility conflicts are taken into consideration while generating the operations schedules in an optimum way. This paper proposes a tabu search heuristic for earth observation satellite scheduling problem, where as earth observing operations have to be scheduled on several resources while respecting time constraint and taking the priorities of the operations into account with the objective of scheduling as many operations as possible within its time window. The computational results indicate that this approach is typically effective to generate a near optimal and feasible schedule for imaging operations of the satellite.