An Improved Estimation of Distribution Algorithm for Earth Observation Satellite Scheduling Problem

Earth observation satellites play a pivotal role in advancing our understanding of the Earth and its environment. By strategically scheduling satellite orbits and observation, they perform a wide range of critical tasks. In this paper, we consider developing efficient solution schemes for the Earth observation satellites scheduling problems. We first formulate the scheduling problems as mixed-integer programming and then we propose an improved estimation of distribution algorithm, which is a swarm intelligence-type optimization algorithm. The proposed algorithm can efficiently compute a near-optimal solution of an scheduling problem. Numerical studies on a class of the Earth observation satellite scheduling problem suggest that the proposed algorithm generally display better performance and more stability than its classical counterpart.