A DQN-based hyperheuristic algorithm for emergency scheduling of Earth observation satellites

With the surge of emergency task demand, large-scale Earth observation satellite emergency scheduling has become a practical problem which is urgent to be solved. In view of this situation, this paper analyzes the constrains and conflict relationship in this problem, and proposes a DQN-based hyperheuristic algorithm. The algorithm includes encoding and decoding, deep Q-network and several low-level heuristic operators. A Markov decision model of this problem is established and 7 low-level heuristic operators are designed according the feature of this problem. After training, DQN behaves well when selecting operators for the scheduling scheme. Finally, several groups of comparative experiments verify the algorithm's ability in solving large-scale satellite emergency scheduling problems.