Satellite downlink scheduling under breakpoint resume mode
This addresses scheduling challenges for satellite data transmission, offering an incremental improvement by introducing a breakpoint resume mode to enhance flexibility and performance.
The paper tackles the satellite downlink scheduling problem under breakpoint resume mode, which allows data to be downloaded in pieces across different windows, and proposes a heuristic algorithm that shows efficiency compared to a CPLEX solver in numerical experiments.
A novel problem called satellite downlink scheduling problem (SDSP) under breakpoint resume mode (SDSP-BRM) is studied in our paper. Compared to the traditional SDSP where an imaging data has to be completely downloaded at one time, SDSP-BRM allows the data of an imaging data be broken into a number of pieces which can be downloaded in different playback windows. By analyzing the characteristics of SDSP-BRM, we first propose a mixed integer programming model for its formulation and then prove the NP-hardness of SDSP-BRM. To solve the problem, we design a simple and effective heuristic algorithm (SEHA) where a number of problem-tailored move operators are proposed for local searching. Numerical results on a set of well-designed scenarios demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in comparison to the general purpose CPLEX solver. We conduct additional experiments to shed light on the impact of the segmental strategy on the overall performance of the proposed SEHA.