An AI Planning-based Tool for Scheduling Satellite Nominal Operations

Satellite domains are becoming a fashionable area of research within the AI community due to the complexity of the problems that these domains need to solve. With the current US and European focus on launching satellites for communication, broadcasting, or localization tasks, among others, the automatic control of these machines becomes an important problem. Many new techniques in both the planning and scheduling fields have been applied successfully, but still much work is left to be done for reliable autonomous architectures. The purpose of the paper is to present consat, a real application that allows to plan and schedule nominal operations to perform in four satellites along the year for a commercial Spanish satellites company: hispasat. We have used an AI domain independent planner for this task that solves the planning and scheduling problems in the hispasat domain thanks to its capability of representing and handling continuous variables, coding functions to obtain operators variables values and the use of control rules to prune the search. We also abstract the approach in order to generalize it to other domains that need an integrated approach to planning and scheduling.