Article ID: | iaor20084588 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 177 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 750 |
End Page Number: | 762 |
Publication Date: | Mar 2007 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Laporte Gilbert, Desrosiers Jacques, Cordeau Jean-Franois, Bianchessi Nicola, Raymond Vincent |
Keywords: | heuristics: tabu search |
Earth observation satellites are platforms equipped with optical instruments that orbit the Earth in order to take photographs of specific areas at the request of users. This article is concerned with the management of several satellites performing multiple orbits over a given planning horizon. It describes a tabu search heuristic for the problem of selecting and scheduling the requests 'to be satisfied, under operational constraints. An upper bounding procedure based on column generation is used to evaluate the quality of the solutions. The results of extensive computational experiments performed on data provided by the French Centre National d'Études Spatiales are reported.