Operating Earth-observing satellites requires efficient planning methods that coordinate activities of multiple spacecraft. The satellite task-planning problem entails selecting actions that best satisfy mission objectives for autonomous execution. Task scheduling is often performed by human operators assisted by heuristic or rule-based planning tools. This approach does not efficiently scale to multiple assets as heuristics frequently fail to properly coordinate actions of multiple vehicles over long horizons. Additionally, the problem becomes more difficult to solve for large constellations as the complexity of the problem scales exponentially in the number of requested observations and linearly in the number of spacecraft. It is expected that new commercial optical- and radar-imaging constellations will require automated planning methods to meet stated responsiveness and throughput objectives. This paper introduces a new approach for solving the satellite-scheduling problem by generating an infeasibility-based graph representation of the problem and finding a maximal independent set of vertices for the graph. The approach is tested on a scenario of up to 10,000 requested imaging locations for the SkySat constellation of optical satellites as well as simulated constellations of up to 24 satellites. Performance is compared with contemporary graph-traversal and mixed-integer linear programming approaches. Empirical results demonstrate improvements in the solution time along with the number of scheduled collections beyond baseline methods. For large problems, the maximum independent set approach is able to find a feasible schedule with 8% more collections in 75% less time.

运行地球观测卫星需要有效的规划方法来协调多个航天器的活动。卫星任务规划问题需要选择最能满足自主执行任务目标的行动。任务调度通常由人工操作员在启发式或基于规则的规划工具的协助下执行。这种方法不能有效地扩展到多个资产，因为启发式方法经常无法正确协调多个车辆的长期行动。此外，对于大型星座，该问题变得更加难以解决，因为问题的复杂性在请求的观测数量上呈指数级增长，在航天器数量上呈线性增长。预计新的商业光学和雷达成像星座将需要自动规划方法来满足既定的响应能力和吞吐量目标。本文介绍了一种解决卫星调度问题的新方法，该方法通过生成问题的基于不可行性的图表示并找到图的最大独立顶点集。该方法在 SkySat 光学卫星星座以及多达 24 颗卫星的模拟星座的多达 10,000 个请求成像位置的场景中进行了测试。性能与当代图遍历和混合整数线性规划方法进行了比较。实证结果表明，解决方案时间有所改进，并且超出了基线方法的计划收集数量。对于大问题，