Solving the selecting and scheduling satellite photographs problem with a consistent neighborhood heuristic

The problem of managing an Agile Earth Observing Satellite consists of selecting and scheduling a subset of photographs, among a set of candidate ones, satisfying imperative constraints and maximizing a gain function. In this paper, we propose a tabu search algorithm to solve the management problem of an Agile Earth Observing Satellite. This algorithm is an adaptation of CN-Tabu methodology working on a consistent neighborhood. Indeed, to obtain a wide-ranging and efficient exploration, the search space is sampled by consistent and saturated configurations. The consistency is maintained by constraint propagation and the saturation is a feature of the optimal solution. Furthermore, our tabu algorithm is hybridized with a systematic search, using partial enumerations, to solve several decisional problems. Moreover, for better resolution, a second objective problem, the minimization of the sum of transition durations between two image acquisitions, is introduced and tackled with a second tabu search algorithm.