High-performance technique for satellite range scheduling

As the number of daily satellite service requests increases, the satellite range scheduling problem becomes more intractable during the ground station operations management. The NP-complete problem involves scheduling satellite requests to ground station antennas within their time windows so that the profit from the scheduled requests is maximized. This paper analyzes various conflicts between satellite requests and then develops a conflict-resolution technique. The technique first builds an elite initial schedule using a prescheduling strategy and then improves the initial schedule using a rescheduling strategy in a subspace of feasible solutions. The main highlight of the technique is its dual functions of quickly generating a high-quality solution and providing a good bound. As shown in the experimental results from the actual data and more difficult random instances, the proposed technique is significantly better than the best-known heuristic. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.