Optimal Fixed Interval Satellite Range Scheduling

The satellite scheduling community has provided several algorithms for allocating interaction windows between ground stations and satellites, from simple greedy approaches to more complex hybrid-genetic or Lagrangian-relaxation techniques. Single-location ground station problems, where requests have fixed time intervals and no priorities, are known to be solvable in polynomial time. To the best of our knowledge, no algorithm has been provided yet for solving multiple-location, prioritized scheduling problems optimally. We present an exact polynomial time algorithm for a fixed number of ground stations (or satellites), based on a modified algorithm from the general scheduling literature.