Problem-Specific Knowledge Based Heuristic Algorithm to Solve Satellite Broadcast Scheduling Problem

Abstract

In this paper we propose a simple, fast and scalable heuristic for solving the Satellite Broadcast Scheduling problem. The satellite broadcast scheduling optimization problem is known to be an NP-complete problem, where the aim of such scheduling problem is to find a valid broadcasting scheduling pattern that maximizes the number of broadcasting's timeslots under certain constraints. Our Problem-specific knowledge heuristic utilizes the information of the problem itself to build a set of priority numbers that determine the order in which terminals are assigned to satellites in each timeslot. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm is shown by a thorough comparison with existing techniques for the benchmark problems reported in the literature and for randomly generated test instances with varying sizes. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms are indeed very effective in finding comparable and even better solutions (i.e. for some benchmarks), and outperform the existing algorithms by finding optimal solutions for almost all tested benchmarks.