Generating short-term observation schedules for space mission projects

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new dispatching rule and a set of local search algorithms based on the filtered beam search, GRASP and simulated annealing methodologies to construct short-term observation schedules of space mission projects, mainly for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The main features of generating short-term observations of HST are state dependent set up times, user specified deadlines, visibility windows of the targets and the priorities assigned to the observations. The objective of HST scheduling is to maximize the scientific return. We have tested the relative performances of the proposed algorithms including the nearest neighbor rule both in objective function value and computational time aspects by utilizing a full-factorial experimental design.