How to Manage the New Generation of Agile Earth Observation Satellites ?

In this paper, we address the problem of managing the new generation of agile Earth Observing Satellites. Whereas non-agile satellites such as Spot have only one degree of freedom for acquiring images, the new generation satellites have three, giving opportunities for a more efficient scheduling of observations. A counterpart of this advantage is that the scheduling of observations is made much more difficult, due to the larger search space for potential solutions. Two quite different methods have been investigated in order to solve the scheduling of agile Earth Observing Satellites : a method based on the existing Constraint Programming framework, and a Local Search method, based on insertion/removal of images in a sequence.