Multi-Satellite Mission Planning for Environmental and Disaster Monitoring Satellite System

This article concerns the problem of managing China's Environmental and Disaster Monitoring Satellite System (EDMSS) which is composed of multiple satellites with different image types and different operation constraints. In order to coordinate these different characteristic satellites to maximally satisfy the user's requests, we propose a novel distributed mission planning architecture which holds both centralized and decentralized features. Its kernel is a centralized scheduling module which considers the universal resource constraints that all satellites included may share, while its external module is responsible for checking the special constraints related to each satellite and repairing the schedule correspondingly. The mission of EDMSS may include both spot target observations and polygon area target observations. To describe them in one model, we present a dynamic segmenting method to partition polygon areas based on the characteristics of satellite orbits, parameters of on-board sensors and the shapes of the polygons. Through coverage analysis and a profit calculation function, the two different kinds of observations can be scheduled under the same problem-solving architecture. We also propose a mission planning system based on the above techniques. Long range planning and daily scheduling are implemented in a rolling-horizon way. © 2008 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.