Satellite range scheduling: A comparison of genetic, heuristic and local search

Abstract

Three algorithms are tested on the satellite range scheduling problem, using data from the U.S. Air Force Satellite Control Network; a simple heuristic, as well as local search methods, are compared against a genetic algorithm on old benchmark problems as well as problems produced by a generator we recently developed. The simple heuristic works well on the old benchmark, but fails to scale to larger, more complex problems produced by our generator. The genetic algorithm yields the best overall performance on larger, more difficult problems.