Decentralized, Decomposition-Based Observation Scheduling for a Large-Scale Satellite Constellation

• DOI: 10.1613/jair.1.16997
• Publication Date: 2025-01-18T03:39:00Z
• Authors: Itai Zilberstein; Ananya Rao; Matthew Salis; Steve Chien
• Keywords: Satellite constellation

Deploying multi-satellite constellations for Earth observation requires coordinating potentially hundreds of spacecraft. With increasing onboard capability autonomy, we can view the constellation as a multi-agent system (MAS) and employ decentralized scheduling solutions. We analyze problem (COSP) formulate it distributed constraint optimization (DCOP). COSP scalable inter-agent communication computation consists millions variables which, coupled with assumptions structure, make existing DCOP algorithms inadequate this application. develop approach that employs carefully constructed heuristic, referred to Geometric Neighborhood Decomposition (GND) decompose global into sub-problems enable application techniques. present Stochastic Search (NSS) algorithm, algorithm effectively solve other large-scale problems, using decomposition. The experiments confirm efficacy against baseline algorithms, discuss generality NSS, GND, properties domains.