Authors:
Camille Lescuyer
1
;
Christian Artigues
2
;
Jean-Thomas Camino
1
and
Cédric Pralet
3
Affiliations:
1
Airbus Defence and Space, 31 Rue des Cosmonautes, 31402, Toulouse, France
;
2
CNRS, LAAS, 7 Avenue du Colonel Roche, F-31400, Toulouse, France
;
3
ONERA/DTIS, University of Toulouse, 2 Avenue Edouard Belin, 31400 Toulouse, France
Keyword(s):
Telecommunication Satellite, Television Broadcasting, Linguistic Beam, Heuristic, Graph Coloring.
Abstract:
In this paper, we tackle a payload design problem for a broadcasting mission where a telecommunication satellite must provide television services to distinct regions defined as polygons. To cover these polygons, several telecommunication beams are emitted by the satellite, with the risk that they mutually degrade their performance while also being hard to accommodate mechanically on the spacecraft. The problem is to determine a set of non-conflicting beams that cover all the regions and optimize a performance metric related to the sizes of the beams used. The first method is a matheuristic exploiting iterative solv of an ILP model. The second method, called the merge-and-split heuristic, is inspired by Iterated Local Search and reuses a fast graph coloring algorithm to analyze conflicts among selected beams. These two methods are evaluated on realistic instances, the largest one involving more than one hundred regions to cover.