The payload of communications satellites must go through a series of tests to assert their ability to survive in space. Each test involves some equipment of the payload to be active, which has an impact on the temperature of the payload. Sequencing these tests in a way that ensures the thermal stability of the payload and minimizes the overall duration of the test campaign is a very important objective for satellite manufacturers. The problem can be decomposed in two sub-problems corresponding to two objectives: First, the number of distinct configurations necessary to run the tests must be minimized. This can be modeled as packing the tests into configurations, and we introduce a set of implied constraints to improve the lower bound of the model. Second, tests must be sequenced so that the number of times an equipment unit has to be switched on or off is minimized. We model this aspect using the constraint Switch, where a buffer with limited capacity represents the currently active equipment units, and we introduce an improvement of the propagation algorithm for this constraint. We then introduce a search strategy in which we sequentially solve the sub-problems (packing and sequencing). Experiments conducted on real and random instances show the respective interest of our contributions.

中文翻译：

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用于计划通信卫星测试活动的约束编程

通信卫星的有效载荷必须经过一系列测试，才能确定其在太空中生存的能力。每次测试都涉及有效负载的某些设备，这会影响有效负载的温度。对这些测试进行排序以确保有效载荷的热稳定性并最大程度地减少测试活动的总体持续时间，这对卫星制造商来说是一个非常重要的目标。该问题可以分解为与两个目标相对应的两个子问题：首先，必须最小化运行测试所必需的不同配置的数量。这可以建模为将测试打包到配置中，并且我们引入了一组隐式约束来改善模型的下限。第二，测试必须按顺序进行，以使必须打开或关闭设备单元的次数最少。我们使用约束对该方面进行建模Switch，其中容量有限的缓冲区代表当前处于活动状态的设备单位，我们针对此约束引入了传播算法的改进。然后，我们介绍一种搜索策略，在该策略中我们依次解决子问题（打包和排序）。在真实和随机实例上进行的实验表明了我们所做贡献的各自兴趣。