With the improvement of satellite autonomy, multi-satellite cooperative mission planning has become an important application. This requires multiple satellites to interact with each other via inter-satellite links to reach a consistent mission planning scheme. Considering issues such as inter-satellite link failure, external interference, and communication delay, algorithms should minimize communication costs as much as possible. The CBBA algorithm belongs to a fully distributed multi-agent task allocation algorithm, which has been introduced into multi-satellite autonomous task planning scenarios and achieved good planning results. This paper mainly focuses on the communication problem, and proposes an improved algorithm based on it, which is called c-CBBA. The algorithm is designed with task preemption strategy and single-chain strategy to reduce the communication volume. The task preemption strategy is an accelerated convergence mechanism designed for the convergence characteristics of CBBA, while the single-chain strategy is a communication link pruning strategy designed for the information exchange characteristics of satellites. Experiments in various scenarios show that the algorithm can effectively reduce communication volume while ensuring the effectiveness of task planning.

Satellite establishes a satellite ground station to satellite link with a ground station to complete data transmission. However, in China, satellite ground stations only exist within the country. With the rapid increase in the number of satellites, effectively dispatching satellite communications and maximizing the performance of ground stations are necessary. We propose a heuristic adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm (H-ALNS) to solve the satellite data transmission scheduling (SDTS) problem. The algorithm includes two heuristic rules for generating the initial scheme and the conflict reduction process after updating the neighborhood. A heuristic task assignment method is used to select the execution time window and position for the task sequence. The adaptive operator is used to update the delete operator and insert operator weights into the H-ALNS. The quality of the generated planning scheme improved through continuous neighborhood destruction and repair. Through experimental analysis, the algorithm we propose is feasible for solving SDTS problems and surpasses the planning results acquired using other comparison algorithms. The H-ALNS has good prospects for practical engineering applications.

Satellite observation scheduling plays a significant role in improving the efficiency of Earth observation systems. To solve the large-scale multi-satellite observation scheduling problem, this paper proposes an ensemble of meta-heuristic and exact algorithm based on a divide-and-conquer framework (EHE-DCF), including a task allocation phase and a task scheduling phase. In the task allocation phase, each task is allocated to a proper orbit based on a meta-heuristic incorporated with a probabilistic selection and a tabu mechanism derived from ant colony optimization and tabu search respectively. In the task scheduling phase, we construct a task scheduling model for every single orbit, and use an exact method (i.e., branch and bound, B&B) to solve this model. The task allocation and task scheduling phases are performed iteratively to obtain a promising solution. To validate the performance of EHE-DCF, we compare it with B&B, three divide-and-conquer based meta-heuristics, and a state-of-the-art meta-heuristic. Experimental results show that EHE-DCF can obtain higher scheduling profits and complete more tasks compared with existing algorithms. EHE-DCF is especially efficient for large-scale satellite observation scheduling problems.