Resolution of an Antenna–Satellite assignment problem by means of Integer Linear Programming

Abstract

Ground station operators have to assign different antennas in their ground stations network to passes of satellites from customers that have requested the use of the network. However, for operators that support a high number of satellites, in many cases these requests yield conflicts (which appear when more than one satellite requests the same time slot on the same antenna). If there are many conflicts, the process of deconflicting (i.e., moving passes to other antennas or sites or cancelling them so that conflicts are avoided) is not very efficient when done manually, due to the large number of interacting requests. Thus, there is a need for an automatic tool that is able to manage the Antenna-Satellite assignment problem for a large number of passes, by considering the problem globally for a given time-frame (for instance, a week). In this paper we propose to address the deconfliction process by means of Integer Linear Programming. Models that take into account the basic deconflicting operations (moving antenna, moving site, shortening, or cancelling), are proposed and tested on real data provided by the company that posed this problem, yielding better results than the solutions obtained by their previous system.

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