An Optimization Approach for the Daily Photograph Selection of Earth Observation Satellites.

The mission of an earth observation satellite (EOS) is to acquire images of specified areas of the Earth surface related to observation requests from customers. This paper proposes an optimization approach for the daily photograph selection problem (DPSP) of EOSs. DPSP is related to operational management of EOSs and about the scheduling of observations for an EOS. Each photograph related to a customer order generates a profit but not all of the requests can be satisfied due to some physical and technological constraints. Then the problem is to select a subset of requests of maximal profit. The proposed algorithm inherits the hyper-cube framework of ant colony optimization (ACO) metaheuristic. Realistic instances are used as benchmark problems. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable of generating competitive and promising solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]