An integrated image task planning in satellite networks: From instruction release and observation perspective

Abstract

The unreasonable observation arrangements in the satellite operation control center (SOCC) may result in the observation data cannot be downloaded as scheduled. Meanwhile, if the operation instructions released by the satellite telemetry tracking center (STTC) for the on-board payloads are not injected on the specific satellites in time, the corresponding satellites cannot perform the observation operations as planned. Therefore, there is an urgent need to design an integrated instruction release, and observation task planning (I-IRO-TP) scheme by efficiently collaborating the SOCC and STTC. Motivated by this fact, we design an interaction mechanism between the SOCC and the STTC, where we first formulate the I-IRO-TP problem as a constraint satisfaction problem aiming at maximizing the number of completed tasks. Furthermore, we propose an interactive imaging task planning algorithm based on the analysis of resource distribution in the STTC during the previous planning periods to preferentially select the observation arcs that not only satisfy the requirements in the observation resource allocation phase but also facilitate the arrangement of measurement and control instruction release. We conduct extensive simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of the number of completed tasks.