Abstract

A Remote Sensing Satellites Planning system (RSSP) for satellite constellations is responsible for managing these satellites by assigning the imaging tasks to each satellite in the constellation such that the loads are balanced and the resources are well used. The proposed system can be used with heterogeneous constellations that consist of satellites whose different specifications, different orbits' types and/or different payload types. This problem is a combinatorial optimization NP-hard problem modeled in this paper as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem using the Constraint Programming Technique. The output plan is obtained using one of three objective functions (gain maximization, area maximization, and image quality maximization) using four search algorithms (simulated annealing, hill climbing, tabu search and late acceptance) and different planning horizons (one track, one day and one month).

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