Scheduling earth observation activities in LEO satellites using graph coloring problem

Scheduling system of low earth orbit (LEO) satellite operations is one of the important tasks performed in satellites. Satellite specific constraints, satellite priorities, revenue of certain payloads and special operations, as well as visibility conflicts are taken into consideration while generating the operations schedules in an optimum way. This paper uses graph coloring problem for earth observation satellite scheduling, where as earth observing operations have to be scheduled on several resources while respecting time constraint and taking the revenue of the operations into account with the objective of scheduling as many operations as possible within its time window. Then a tabu search heuristic is proposed for this coloring problem. The computational results indicate that this approach is typically effective to generate a near optimal and feasible schedule for imaging operations of the satellite.