The application of evolutionary computation in Earth Observing Satellites scheduling problem

The mission of Earth Observing Satellite (EOS) is to meet the imaging requests of scientific observing, mapping, military reconnaissance and commercial activities. Satellites scheduling is an important real world problem that impacts the use of expensive and limited resources; it is belongs to a class of multi-machines scheduling problem with time window constraint. The objective of satellites scheduling problem is to make the maximum efficiency of use of satellites. It is proved to be NP-hard in computational complexity. Many traditional techniques are tried to solve this scheduling problem but fail in the large search space and not well understood bottleneck. In this paper, the constraints of satellites scheduling problem are presented, and an overview of the studies of evolutionary computation in satellites scheduling domain also be represented. This paper pointed out that evolutionary algorithm could yield good performance in solving EOS scheduling problem, especially in much more complex condition. That implicates that our future research could adopt evolutionary algorithm.