Generating short-term observation schedules for space mission projects

In this paper, we propose a new dispatching rule and a set of local search algorithms based on the ®ltered beam search, GRASP and simulated annealing methodologies to construct short-term observation schedules of space mission projects, mainly for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The main features of generating short-term observations of HST are state dependent set up times, user speci®ed deadlines, visibility windows of the targets and the priorities assigned to the observations. The objective of HST scheduling is to maximize the scienti®c return. We have tested the relative performances of the proposed algorithms including the nearest neighbor rule both in objective function value and computational time aspects by utilizing a full-factorial experimental design.