COSMO-SkyMed second generation planner

COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation (CSG) system has been conceived, according to Italian Space Agency (ASI) and Italian Ministry of Defence (It-MoD) requirements, at the twofold objective of ensuring operational continuity to the current constellation (COSMO-SkyMed - CSK), while improving functionality and performances. It is an "end-to-end" Italian Earth Observation Dual-Use (Civilian and Defence) Space System with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operating in X-Band. CSG mission planning purpose is to fully employ the system resources, shared between partners with very different needs, producing a mission plan that satisfies the higher priority requests and optimizes the overall plan with the remaining requests according to the users programming rights consumption. CSG Mission Planning tool provides new performances in terms of adaptability and flexibility of the planning and scheduling algorithms conceived to select and synchronize data acquisition and downloading activities. CSG planning and scheduling problem is characterized by a large size of research space and a particular structure of technical and managerial constraints that has led to the implementation of innovative design of the planning algorithms based on both priority criteria and saturation of system resources. This approach envisages two scheduling strategies: the rank-based and the optimization-based. The former strategy is firstly applied to the most important request categories, with an associated rank value or priority level; the latter is subsequently applied to the unranked or lower priority requests. This is an iterative dynamic process of finding optimal solutions able to better answer the demanding requirements coming from the needs of heterogeneous users. © 2014 SPIE.