Satellite Payload Reconfiguration Optimisation: An ILP Model

The increasing size and complexity of communication satellites has made the manual management of their payloads by engineers through computerised schematics difficult and error prone. This article proposes to optimise payload reconfigurations for current and next generation satellites using a novel Integer Linear Programming model (ILP), which is a variant of network flow models. Experimental results using CPLEX demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the approach up to realistic satellite payloads sizes and configurations.