Heuristics for scheduling Earth observing satellites

This paper describes several methods for assigning tasks to Earth Observing Systems Satellites (EOS). We present empirical results for three heuristics, called: Priority Dispatch (PD), Look Ahead (LA), and Genetic Algorithm(GA). These heuristics progress from simple to complex, from less accurate to more accurate, and from fast to slow. We present empirical results as applied to the Window-Constrained Packing problem (WCP). The WCP is a simplified version of the EOS scheduling problem. We discuss the problem of having more than one optimization criteria. We will also discuss the relationship between the WCP and the more traditional Knapsack and Weighted Early/Tardy problems.