Satellite Test Tasks Autonomous Orchestration Based on Task-Coupling Constraints and Time-Bounded Windows

LI Zhen; YU Zhigang; ZHANG Yang; ZHU Xuetian; XIE Ningyu; YANG Fan

doi:10.11999/JEIT250878

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LI Zhen, YU Zhigang, ZHANG Yang, ZHU Xuetian, XIE Ningyu, YANG Fan. Satellite Test Tasks Autonomous Orchestration Based on Task-Coupling Constraints and Time-Bounded Windows[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT250878

Citation:

LI Zhen, YU Zhigang, ZHANG Yang, ZHU Xuetian, XIE Ningyu, YANG Fan. Satellite Test Tasks Autonomous Orchestration Based on Task-Coupling Constraints and Time-Bounded Windows[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT250878

Citation:

LI Zhen, YU Zhigang, ZHANG Yang, ZHU Xuetian, XIE Ningyu, YANG Fan. Satellite Test Tasks Autonomous Orchestration Based on Task-Coupling Constraints and Time-Bounded Windows[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT250878

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Satellite Test Tasks Autonomous Orchestration Based on Task-Coupling Constraints and Time-Bounded Windows

doi: 10.11999/JEIT250878 cstr: 32379.14.JEIT250878

China Satellite Network Innovation Co., Ltd., Beijing 100029, China

Funds: Beijing Nova Program (20240484748), The National Natural Science Foundation of China (62201534)

Received Date: 2025-09-01
Accepted Date: 2026-01-04
Rev Recd Date: 2025-10-29

Available Online: 2026-01-09

Abstract

Abstract

Objective In recent years, the scale of on-orbit space assets has continued to expand, satellite constellation deployment has accelerated significantly, and the number of satellite launches has increased rapidly. As a result, the demand for on-orbit testing has grown sharply. However, limited ground station availability and scarce visibility arcs severely constrain testing opportunities, giving rise to an increasingly prominent contradiction between “many satellites and few ground stations” under highly limited visibility resources. Traditional satellite mission planning approaches, which rely primarily on manual pre-scheduling, suffer from long decision cycles, low planning efficiency, and high susceptibility to scheduling errors. These limitations make them inadequate for large-scale, multi-task, and highly coupled testing scenarios. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop efficient automated on-orbit test mission planning technologies to improve the utilization efficiency of satellite–ground visibility arcs. Methods To address these limitations, this thesis proposes an automated satellite task orchestration framework to ensure effectiveness and reliability in integrated space–ground systems throughout their lifecycle of construction and operation. A task slider model and a time window model are established, and both general and task-specific orchestration constraints are designed to form a unified constraint paradigm for satellite tasks. A non-convex constraint transformation scheme is further proposed. Using satellite-to-ground link testing as a representative application scenario, an automated task orchestration model is constructed to maximize the number of schedulable tasks under stringent visibility arc constraints while improving the efficiency of visibility arc utilization. Results and Discussions Using satellite-to-ground link testing as a representative on-orbit testing scenario, the proposed autonomous orchestration framework is evaluated through simulations with multiple low Earth orbit satellites and limited visibility arcs. The results show that the proposed method schedules testing tasks effectively while strictly satisfying all operational constraints. Compared with traditional heuristic-based algorithms, including genetic algorithms, tabu search, and particle swarm optimization, the proposed approach achieves a significant performance improvement, increasing the total number of scheduled satellite–ground link testing tasks by approximately 1.9 to 2.3 times. The results also indicate that, under highly constrained time windows, the proposed model fully exploits available visibility arcs and avoids resource conflicts, which substantially improves the utilization efficiency of satellite–ground links. Conclusions This paper proposes an autonomous orchestration framework for satellite on-orbit testing tasks under complex coupling constraints and time-bounded visibility windows. By modeling testing subtasks and visibility arcs using task slider and time window abstractions, and by integrating general and task-specific constraints into a unified mixed-integer programming formulation, the proposed method provides an effective solution for large-scale testing task scheduling. Simulation results confirm that the framework outperforms traditional heuristic-based methods in terms of the number of executable testing tasks and visibility arc utilization. The proposed approach provides a practical and extensible scheduling paradigm for future large-scale satellite constellation testing scenarios. Future work will consider additional resource-layer constraints and uncertainty factors to further improve robustness in real-world testing environments.
- Autonomous task orchestration,
- Task slider,
- Time window,
- Constraint satisfaction,
- Mixed-integer programming

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References(29)

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