Onboard coordination and scheduling of multiple autonomous satellites in an uncertain environment

Abstract To meet the demand for real-time response to emergent events in the uncertain environment, the multi-autonomous-satellite system with real-time inter-satellite links and on-board scheduling capability has been proposed. This paper focuses on the multi-autonomous-satellite coordination and scheduling problem which is formulated by a novel mathematical model based on the multi-agent system (MAS). To solve the problem, we firstly analyze general organizational structures for the MAS and propose a new dynamic-distributed organizational structure. For these different structures, an improved contract network protocol (ICNP) and a blackboard model (BM) negotiation mechanism are proposed to coordinate the satellites. Then, an online single-satellite scheduling algorithm is proposed to schedule the tasks. In the experiments, we build up a multi-satellite system to analyze the performance of different autonomous coordination mechanisms. Experimental results indicate that the ICNP mechanism can increase the total revenue and reduce the inter-satellite communication cost. In scenarios where satellites could break down randomly, the BM can reduce the revenue losses and the number of task failures efficiently, which proves the good performance of the proposed methods in terms of robustness. The proposed methods have important practicality in the real application of the multi-autonomous-satellite system.