Modeling and Optimization Approaches for Satellite Broadcast Scheduling Problem

A low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite system has a range of missions delivering economic, environmental, and social benefits utilized by everyone almost every day. However, there exists a challenge for operational management of satellites in LEO because they are not accessible from a given point of earth at all times. In that case, a problem evolves that should be solved is to find a valid broadcasting pattern between satellites and ground stations. Nevertheless, being defined as the satellite broadcast scheduling (SBS) problem almost three decades ago, the few numbers of published studies on the problem used a restricted variety of solution approaches. The recent advances in information technology and tremendous undergoing change in the industrial automation entails handling the SBS problem more comprehensively and propose innovative solution approaches. This article proposes and evaluates three metaheuristic approaches for the SBS problem. A relaxation and decomposition approach is also proposed for generating tighter upper bounds to make justified performance evaluations. Besides the benchmark problems reported in the literature, new benchmark instances are generated and used in computational experiments. Results are evaluated to be promising and highlight the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approaches.