Coordinated Planning of Heterogeneous Earth Observation Resources

Different Earth observation resources (EORs) [e.g., satellites, airships, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)] are usually managed by different organization sub-planners, which lack interactions and cooperation among one another. Such independent resource operations are no longer efficient to meet diverse and vast observation requests, especially in emergency situations, such as earthquakes, flooding, and forest fire disasters. This paper addresses the issue of coordinated planning of heterogeneous EORs, including satellites, airships, and UAVs. A hierarchical coordinated planning architecture is proposed to integrate heterogeneous EORs for the construction of a distributed and loosely coupled Earth observation system. The architecture comprises four component categories, namely, observation resource, sub-planner, coordination, and information management. Moreover, we propose two task assignment algorithms to coordinate and allocate observation tasks to sub-planners. The first algorithm is a highest-weight-first-allocated algorithm, and the second is a tabu-list-based simulated annealing (SA-TL) algorithm. Experiments and comparative studies demonstrate the efficiency of the coordinated planning architecture and SA-TL algorithm. We also show that the system responds dynamically to unexpected situations through effective disturbance-handling mechanisms.