BFA-based algorithm for the SPOT5 daily photograph scheduling problem

The scheduling of daily photograph satellites has obtained more and more attentions as the requirement for earth image steadily increases. SPOT5 investigated in this paper is a typical commercial imaging satellite. A binary firefly algorithm with a repairment strategy is developed in term of the feature of the SPOT5 daily photograph scheduling problem. In the repairment strategy of the proposed algorithm, the dropping operation repairs the infeasible solution and the adding operation improves the quality of solution. The proposed repairment strategy firstly handles the logical constraints with a large number of sparse coefficients and then the onboard memory limitation to enhance the searching ability of the proposed algorithm in the large-scale combinatory space. The experimental results on the SPOT5 benchmark test suite verify the efficiency of the proposed algorithm and its superiority to the genetic algorithm in term of the quality of the solution found.