Distance Preserving Recombination Operator for Earth Observation Satellites Operations Scheduling

The paper describes an adaptation of a memetic algorithm to the problem of scheduling operations of Earth observation satellites. The adaptation uses a systematic approach to the design of the recombination operator preserving important features common to both parents. The important features are identified experimentally on the basis of correlations between the value of the objective function and the similarity of good solutions. Our results indicate that this systematic approach reduces the effort needed to design a high quality recombination operator by avoiding not promising development directions.