A Mathematical Programming Solution to the Mars Express Memory Dumping Problem

The problem of computing a schedule of maximum robustness for the Mars Express mission is formulated and solved via linear programming (LP). We also provide a characterization of "easy" and "difficult" instances such that the former ones can be solved to optimality directly, without having recourse to any optimization algorithm. In both cases, provably optimal solutions are obtained in shorter computing time compared to previously published approaches. Starting from the simplified model already described in the literature, we extend it to consider real constraints. For this purpose, we define an integer LP model with four different objective functions and develop a decision support system based on hierarchical optimization of the first two objectives and multicriteria optimization of the other two.