A hill climbing algorithm for ground station scheduling

Abstract

Ground Station Scheduling arises in satellite mission planning and belongs to scheduling family with time windows. It is know for its high computational complexity and hardness to solve to optimality. In fact, in some cases it is even hard to find a feasible solution that satisfies all user requirements and resource constraints. In this paper we present a Hill Climbing (HC) algorithm for the problem, which is a fast local search algorithm. Despite of being a simple search method, HC showed a good performance for small size instance while could not cope with medium and large size instances. The Satellite Toolkit is used for its experimental study and performance evaluation. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.