Mission planning for a non-homogeneous Earth observation satellite constellation for disaster response

Abstract : This article explores the mission planning problem for a constellation of non-homogeneous Earth observation satellites for disaster response to promote cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region between different space agencies or satellite operators. Given a set of weighted requests consisting of a polygonal area, a list of collaborating satellites and a time horizon, the goal is first to compute the observation opportunities and then to plan a sequence of acquisitions for each sensor to optimize the total coverage in the first days to help the disaster management agencies. The non-homogeneous satellites (non-agile or agile) and the different orbits result in a huge combinatorial search space. A simplified computational method is proposed to generate the observation opportunities and a metaheuristic based on the Simulated Annealing algorithm is used to solve the mission planning problem. Real requests from disaster management agencies are used to evaluate the proposed methodology.