Simulated annealing algorithm for EOS scheduling problem with task merging

The slew operations of earth observation satellites are tightly constrained, observation scheduling with task merging can improve satellites observing efficiency. The model of satellite observation scheduling problem with task merging is proposed in this paper article and a Very Fast Simulated Annealing algorithm (VFSA) is developed to solve the problem. The VFSA algorithm employs compose and decompose neighborhoods for dynamic task merging. To avoid the local optimum solutions and improve the exploration abilities, re-annealing and three diversification strategies, perturb, rearrange and restart are defined in VFSA. Experiments results show the effectiveness of our approach.