A method of effectiveness evaluation for satellite observation and data-downlink scheduling considering weather uncertainties

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites play an important role in human space activities, and market demands for commercial uses of LEO satellites have been increasing rapidly in recent years. However, satellite resources are very limited, and are much more costly than terrestrial observation resources. In order to utilize the scarce resources efficiently and maximize their commercial benefits, it is important to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the earth observation tasks arranged for a satellite. In this paper, we propose a method of effectiveness evaluation for satellite observation and data-downlink scheduling (SODS) based on the Availability– Dependability–Capacity (ADC) framework, which is designed to evaluate the overall performance of satellites from the perspective of time resource utilization, the success rate of tasks, and profit return. The effects of weather uncertainties on the tasks’ success rates are considered, and a case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.