As the dependence on satellite imaging continues to grow, modern satellites have become increasingly agile, with the new generation, namely super-agile Earth observation satellites (SAEOS), providing unprecedented imaging flexibility. The highly dynamic capabilities of these satellites introduce additional challenges to the scheduling of observation tasks, as existing approaches for conventional agile satellites do not account for variable observation durations and multiple imaging directions. Although some efforts have been made in this regard, the SAEOS imaging scheduling problem (SAEOS-ISP) remains largely unexplored, and no exact approaches have yet been proposed. In this context, this study presents the first exact Constraint Programming formulation for the SAEOS-ISP, considering flexible observation windows, multiple pointing directions and sequence-dependent transition times across multiple satellites. Computational experiments on a newly generated benchmark set demonstrate that the model can be solved efficiently and within very short computational times. Moreover, the results also show that the proposed approach has the potential to achieve higher computational performance compared to the non-exact approaches that are currently considered state-of-the-art.

翻译：随着对卫星成像的依赖持续增长，现代卫星的敏捷性日益增强，新一代超敏捷对地观测卫星（SAEOS）提供了前所未有的成像灵活性。这些卫星的高度动态能力为观测任务调度带来了额外挑战，因为现有针对传统敏捷卫星的方法未考虑可变的观测时长和多个成像方向。尽管已有一些相关研究，但超敏捷对地观测卫星成像调度问题（SAEOS-ISP）在很大程度上仍未得到充分探索，且尚未有精确求解方法被提出。在此背景下，本研究首次提出了SAEOS-ISP的精确约束规划模型，该模型综合考虑了灵活的观测窗口、多指向方向以及多卫星间序列相关的转换时间。在新生成的基准测试集上的计算实验表明，该模型能够在极短的计算时间内高效求解。此外，结果还显示，与当前被视为最先进的非精确方法相比，所提出的方法具有实现更高计算性能的潜力。