Multi-type multi-objective imaging scheduling method based on improved NSGA-III for satellite formation system

Abstract This paper studies the imaging scheduling issue for China’s L-band differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) satellite formation which can work in different observation modes to satisfy different imaging requests. Previous imaging scheduling mainly focuses on maximizing the total revenue of selected targets but ignores that different types of targets actually have different demands. Therefore, a constraint satisfaction model which classifies targets into three types according to targets’ size and number of observations is established, meanwhile, three objective functions are considered to satisfy demands of different types of targets. Furthermore, an imaging scheduling method based on improved non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm III (NSGA-III) is proposed to obtain a set of well-converged and well-diversified non-dominating solutions. New Niche-Preservation operation with the same penalty value for convergence and diversity performance is adopted in NSGA-III. Numerical comparison simulations on walking fish group (WFG) test suits and three imaging scheduling instances of different size show the superiority of the proposed methodology.