Solving the Observing and Downloading Integrated Scheduling Problem of Earth Observation Satellite with a Quantum Genetic Algorithm

Abstract This paper addresses the integrated Earth observation satellite scheduling problem. It is a complicated problem because observing and downloading operations are both involved. We use an acyclic directed graph model to describe the observing and downloading integrated scheduling problem. Based on the model which considering energy constraints and storage capacity constraints, we develop an efficient solving method using a novel quantum genetic algorithm. We design a new encoding and decoding scheme that can generate feasible solution and increase the diversity of the population. The results of the simulation experiments show that the proposed method solves the integrated Earth observation satellite scheduling problem with good performance and outperforms the genetic algorithm and greedy algorithm on all instances.