Multi-granularity mission negotiation for a decentralized remote sensing satellite cluster

Satellite remote sensing is developing towards the micro-satellite cluster, which brings new challenges to mission assignment and planning for the cluster. A multi-agent system (MAS) is used, but the time delay caused by communication and computation is rarely considered. To solve the problem, a neural-network-based multi-granularity negotiation method under decentralized architecture is proposed. Firstly, we divided negotiation into three levels of granularity, and they work in different modes. Secondly, a neural network was trained to help the satellite select the best level in real-time. Through experiments, we compared the satellites working in three different levels of granularity, in which a multi-granularity decision was used. As a result of our experiments, a lower cost-effectiveness ratio was obtained, which proved that the multi-granularity negotiation method proposed in this paper is practical.