Three Scheduling Algorithms Applied to the Earth Observing Systems Domain

William J. Wolfe () and Stephen E. Sorensen ()
Additional contact information
William J. Wolfe: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Colorado at Denver, Denver, Colorado 80217
Stephen E. Sorensen: Hughes Information Technology Systems, Aurora, Colorado 80011

Management Science, 2000, vol. 46, issue 1, 148-166

Abstract: This paper describes three approaches to assigning tasks to earth observing satellites (EOS). A fast and simple priority dispatch method is described and shown to produce acceptable schedules most of the time. A look ahead algorithm is then introduced that outperforms the dispatcher by about 12% with only a small increase in run time. These algorithms set the stage for the introduction of a genetic algorithm that uses job permutations as the population. The genetic approach presented here is novel in that it uses two additional binary variables, one to allow the dispatcher to occasionally skip a job in the queue and another to allow the dispatcher to occasionally allocate the worst position to the job. These variables are included in the recombination step in a natural way. The resulting schedules improve on the look ahead by as much as 15% at times and 3% on average. We define and use the "window-constrained packing" problem to model the bare bones of the EOS scheduling problem.

Keywords: Scheduling; Algorithms; Genetic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.46.1.148.15134 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:46:y:2000:i:1:p:148-166

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().