Steady State Genetic Algorithm for Ground Station Scheduling Problem

Ground station scheduling problem arises in spacecraft operations and aims to allocate ground stations to spacecraft to make possible the communication between operations teams and spacecraft systems. This problem consists in computing an optimal planning of communications between satellites or spacecraft (SC) and operations teams of Ground Station (GS). The information transmitted in these communications is usually basic information such as telemetry, tracking or information tasks to be performed and the time normally required for communication is usually quite smaller than the window of visibility of SCs to GSs. The problem is known for its high complexity and has been shown computationally hard to solve to optimality. Additionally, several optimization objectives can be formulated and sought for the problem, namely, windows fitness, clashes fitness, time requirement fitness, and resource usage fitness. In this paper, we present the resolution of the problem through Steady State Genetic Algorithm (SSGA), in which a few individuals are replaced during genetic evolution. We evaluated the performance of the SSGA through a suite of instances generated with the STK simulation toolkit. The Steady State could find for most instances very high quality solutions although its performance was not equally good for all considered objectives.