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.
Highlights
Mission operations arise by the need to coordinate communications of spacecrafts with ground stations
We focus on the version of ground station scheduling, for which we present computational results obtained with Genetic Algorithms using the Satellite Tool Kit (STK) simulation toolkit
We present Genetic Algorithms for the ground station scheduling and report some computational results for the version with multiple ground stations
Summary
Mission operations arise by the need to coordinate communications of spacecrafts (extra-planetary crafts including satellites, space stations, etc.) with ground stations. Operation teams request an antenna at a ground station for a specific time window. The number of requests could be large but most importantly different requests maybe conflicting making it very complex to manually compute the time windows for communication of spacecrafts with ground stations. ESA manages several ground stations to support its own missions as well as other missions upon industry costumers request. The number of ground stations [2] is rather limited, less than ten, supporting the ESA’s missions (Kourou (French Guiana), Maspalomas, Villafranca and Cebreros (Spain), Redu (Belgium), Santa Maria (Portugal), Kiruna (Sweden), Perth and New Norcia
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