In intelligent manufacturing, it is important to schedule orders from customers efficiently. Make-to-order companies may have to reject or postpone orders when the production capacity does not meet the demand. Many such real-world scheduling problems are characterised by processing times being dependent on the start time (time dependency) or on the preceding orders (sequence dependency), and typically have an earliest and latest possible start time. We introduce and analyze four algorithmic ideas for this class of time/sequence-dependent over-subscribed scheduling problems with time windows: a novel hybridization of adaptive large neighbourhood search (ALNS) and tabu search (TS), a new randomization strategy for neighbourhood operators, a partial sequence dominance heuristic, and a fast insertion strategy. Through factor analysis, we demonstrate the performance of these new algorithmic features on problem domains with varying properties. Evaluation of the resulting general purpose algorithm on three domains—an order acceptance and scheduling problem, a real-world multi-orbit agile Earth observation satellite scheduling problem, and a time-dependent orienteering problem with time windows—shows that our hybrid algorithm robustly outperforms general algorithms including a mixed integer programming method, a constraint programming method, recent state-of-the-art problem-dependent meta-heuristic methods, and a two-stage hybridization of ALNS and TS.

The agile earth observation satellite scheduling problem (AEOSSP) is a combinatorial optimization problem with time-dependent constraints. Recently, many construction heuristics and meta-heuristics have been proposed; however, existing methods cannot balance the requirements of efficiency and timeliness. In this paper, we propose a graph attention network-based decision neural network (GDNN) to solve the AEOSSP. Specifically, we first represent the task and time-dependent attitude transition constraints by a graph. We then describe the problem as a Markov decision process and perform feature engineering. On this basis, we design a GDNN to guide the construction of the solution sequence and train it with proximal policy optimization (PPO). Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms construction heuristics at scheduling profit by at least 45%. The proposed method can also calculate the approximate profits of the state-of-the-art method with an error of less than 7% and reduce scheduling time markedly. Finally, we demonstrate the scalability of the proposed method.

Intentional spoofing interference can cause damage to the navigation terminal and threaten the security of a global navigation satellite system (GNSS). For spoofing interference, an anti-spoofing algorithm based on pseudorange differences for a single receiver is proposed, which can be used to detect simplistic and intermediate spoofing attacks, as well as meaconing attacks. Double-difference models using the pseudorange of two adjacent epochs are established followed by the application of Taylor expansion to the position relationship between the satellite and the receiver (or the spoofer). The authenticity of the signal can be verified by comparing the results of the proposed spoofing detection algorithm with the traditional least squares method. The results will differ when spoofing is present. The parameter setting of the proposed algorithm is introduced. The algorithm has the advantage of both simplicity and efficiency and needs only a single receiver and pseudorange data. A NovAtel receiver is adopted for the actual experiments. The Texas spoofing test battery (TEXBAT), as well as two other simulation experiments are used to verify the performance of the algorithm. The simulation results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the algorithm.