A hybrid binary artificial bee colony algorithm for the satellite photograph scheduling problem

The satellite photograph scheduling problem has attracted increasing attention owing to its difficulty of solution and remarkable economic importance. The optimization problem involves scheduling the on-board cameras of the Earth observation satellite to gain more profit from the oversubscribed photograph requests. To tackle the real-world problem, a hybrid heuristic algorithm is developed. The algorithm skilfully integrates the common genetic operators and a well-designed two-phase repair operator into the evolutionary framework of an artificial bee colony. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with that of three state-of-the-art metaheuristics on an open test suite consisting of 20 benchmark instances and a new test set composed of 10 randomly generated large-scale problems. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves the best performance.