Swath-acquisition planning in multiple-satellite missions: an exact and heuristic approach

This paper deals with the swath acquisition planning problem for multisatellite Earth observation missions. Given a set of satellites and a mission time frame, the problem we solve consists of selecting a set of acquisitions from the satellites in order to cover a given region of interest during the requested time frame, optimizing a certain objective function.We show that the planning problem can be modeled as a set covering problem, using basic tools of mathematical programming. The formulation of the model requires the solution of a complex computational geometry problem, and therefore the use of heuristics and metaheuristics applies. In this paper, we discuss the efficiency of the constructive phase of a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure algorithm. Computational results comparing the heuristic algorithms with the exact approach are presented.