Making Space in Schedules for Space

Abstract

Given their inherent expense, space missions must utilize available resources efficiently. Allocating resources to a single mission or scientific instrument is in itself a challenging task, and this complexity becomes magnified as fleets of satellites and networks of groundstations and antennas are managed as resource pools. Techniques which perform well for generating schedules for unit capacity resources, though, may not be as well suited for multi-capacity and multi-resource domains. Similarly, techniques which perform well at producing good schedules may not be appropriate for schedule improvement and schedule repair. While there has been increasing interest paid to multi-capacity and multi-resource domains in space, most existing approaches do not adequately address the problem of schedule stability in the context of schedule change. We present a general "task-swapping" procedure which is designed to improve oversubscribed schedules in an anytime fashion in multi-capacity and multi-resource space domains.