Affiliations: Department of Languages and Informatics Systems,
Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain | Centre de Tecnologia Aeroespacial, Barcelona, Spain | Seikei University, Tokyo, Japan | Polytechnic University of Tirana, Tirana, Albania | Fukuoka Institute of Technology, Fukuoka, Japan
Note: [] Corresponding author: Fatos Xhafa, Department of Languages and
Informatics Systems, Technical University of Catalonia, Jordi Girona 1–3,
08034 Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: fatos@lsi.upc.edu
Abstract: Recently there has been a growing interest in mission operations
scheduling problem. The problem, in a variety of formulations, arises in
management of satellite/space missions requiring efficient allocation of user
requests to make possible the communication between operations teams and
spacecraft systems. Not only large space agencies, such as ESA (European Space
Agency) and NASA, but also smaller research institutions and universities can
establish nowadays their satellite mission, and thus need intelligent systems
to automate the allocation of ground station services to space missions. In
this paper, we present some relevant formulations of the satellite scheduling
viewed as a family of problems and identify various forms of optimization
objectives. The main complexities, due highly constrained nature, windows
accessibility and visibility, multi-objectives and conflicting objectives are
examined. Then, we discuss the resolution of the problem through different
heuristic methods. In particular, we focus on the version of ground station
scheduling, for which we present computational results obtained with Genetic
Algorithms using the STK simulation toolkit.
