A Comparison of Heuristic Methods for Scheduling Earth Observing Satellites Fleet

This paper addressed the planning and scheduling problem for earth observing satellites fleet of China. The author first described the problem scope naturally, then proposed a mixed-integer programming model for a simplified version of the problem, which only considered the data-take activities of the satellites. Then the author gave two heuristic methods for it and made experimental comparisons based on some randomly generated problem instances. Computational Experiments showed that the special conflict-avoided heuristic enjoyed an optimality/computational-time ratio advantage against the other ILOG-based tabu search under a time-critical application background.