Daily imaging scheduling of an Earth observation satellite

This paper presents the research and development of a daily imaging scheduling system for a low-orbit, Earth observation satellite. This satellite daily imaging scheduling problem belongs to a class of single-machine scheduling problems with salient features of sequence-dependent setup effects, job-assembly characteristics, and time window constraints. It is NP-hard in computational complexity. We adopt Lagrangian relaxation and linear search techniques to solve this problem. Numerical results demonstrate that this approach is efficient in applications to the real problems. It is very effective to generate a near-optimal, feasible schedule for the imaging operations of the satellite.