Search

Rapid and responsive Earth observation satellites enable the evaluation of disaster risk, improve relief effectiveness, and reduce suffering and fatalities in the event of sudden disaster events. One promising method for responsive space satellites is orbital maneuvering. This article describes a multitree search framework for multisatellite responsiveness scheduling considering orbital maneuvering, where multiple ground targets are cooperatively observed by multiple observation satellites over a short period of time. Based on the traditional tree search, the proposed method constructs multiple trees and distributes all the targets to multiple satellites, allowing the observation sequence of a single satellite to be optimized. To apply the tree search algorithm, a tree node collection (TNC) composed of the corresponding nodes in multiple trees is used to represent the state of each satellite. Before the expansion phase, one specific node in the TNC is determined for later expansion. A beam search is then used to optimize the observation sequence. Ground-track adjustment techniques using impulse maneuver are considered for visiting a given target. The proposed framework is more effective than other algorithms and achieves a better performance than the previous best method in a typical multisatellite responsiveness scheduling scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]