Satellite range scheduling is the problem of matching task requests to available orbiting and ground resources during their mutual visibility windows. Additional factors such as weather and light conditions, task urgency, channel capacity, and precedence requirements all add complexity to the basic problem. The satellite range scheduling problem has been studied for several years, with early approaches taking approximation approaches and more recent advances in developing optimal solutions for general problems in the domain. The present monograph describes the satellite range scheduling problem and its relation to more general scheduling problems, and presents reference optimal solutions to the basic problem and some derived problems.

The book opens with a prefatory chapter that describes the motivation of the work and outlines its contents, followed by an introductory chapter defining the satellite range scheduling problem and describing the characteristics of its basic fixed interval, centralized, and static scheduling form. Descriptions of derivations arising from varying some of the restrictions on the basic form follow. The next two chapters develop a formal definition and notational elements, and present an algorithm for the fixed interval problem and extensions for discretized and redundancy variants. Simulation results and discussions of complexity are included. The next three chapters describe approaches to three extended models of the problem, specifically a game-theoretic approach to distributed scheduling, scheduling under uncertainty, and reactive scheduling where the priorities of communication intervals are subject to change. A short final chapter summarizes the relationships between different variations of the problems and points out directions for future research.

This is a clearly written, well organized, and very readable monograph, which should be useful for satellite operations engineers (its declared audience) as well as researchers and advanced students in computer science, scheduling theory, and optimization. Since this is an advanced-level text, readers would benefit from prior exposure to concepts and algorithms for scheduling.

While the focus of this monograph is exclusively on satellite range scheduling, readers will have encountered similarly structured problems in other domains (for example, fleet maintenance scheduling comes to mind). Actual problems have more complexities than those addressed here, which the authors acknowledge and discuss, but this book is a good start at a formalization of the problem domain, classification and analysis of problem variants, and furthering the understanding of solution approaches.

With the continuing increase in the number of satellites in earth’s orbit, functionalities offered on satellite platforms, applications for satellite data, communication networks using satellites, and the organizations involved in satellite data and communications, this monograph is a timely and valuable contribution to an increasingly important technological subdiscipline.