Terma and Cosling wins together the tender in optimization proposed by the European Space Agency (ESA)! The strength of this consortium relies on their complementary expertise: aerospace and ground system (Terma); optimization algorithms and constraint programming (Cosling). This fascinating project aims at optimizing communication planning between spacecraft and ground stations, so as to get closer to client expectations, while optimizing available resources. This is a great challenge that combines hard and soft constraints along with multi-objective optimization. Because of the high diversity of missions to plan, one has to take into account many constraints, ranging from spacecraft orbits, to operator shifts, along with embedded databases capacity, this problem is truly fascinating. To tackle this problem, many optimization technologies will be studied: dynamic programming, linear programming, constraint programming, meta-heuristics, etc. Quite a packed programme!
June 21st, 2016
