Task-Driven Three-Layer Distributed Scheduling for Emergency Earth Observation in Large Low-Earth-Orbit Constellations

Qian Yin; Xinwei Wang; Guohua Wu

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arXiv · 2608.14789

Task-Driven Three-Layer Distributed Scheduling for Emergency Earth Observation in Large Low-Earth-Orbit Constellations

Qian Yin·Xinwei Wang·Guohua Wu

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Abstract

Large low-Earth-orbit (LEO) Earth-observation (EO) constellations offer frequent access to geographically dispersed ground targets, but emergency requests may arrive after committed routine-plan execution has begun. The resulting dynamic emergency observation scheduling problem (DEOSP) requires urgent tasks to be inserted under intermittent ground contact without excessive routine-plan disruption. To address DEOSP, we propose a task-driven three-layer distributed scheduling (T3L-DS) method, which represents task demand and sensor footprints on a common geographic grid and forms temporary clusters from observation capabilities and current inter-satellite links. For intra-cluster coordination, T3L-DS introduces onboard dual-plan bidding and joint marginal evaluation. It also designs an inter-cluster coordination mechanism for unresolved demand. Extensive computational experiments compare T3L-DS with centralised simulated annealing (SA), an adapted selective time-variant better reply process (A-SeTVBRP), and a conventional contract-net protocol (CNP). T3L-DS achieves the highest emergency coverage among the distributed methods, with average relative improvements of approximately 2.8% and 17.1% over A-SeTVBRP and CNP, respectively. Its average relative gap from SA is approximately 7.1%. Under conflict-enhanced loads, it reduces routine-coverage loss by approximately 57.9% and 87.7% relative to A-SeTVBRP and CNP, respectively. The ablation study confirms the contribution of the proposed coordination enhancements. Overall, the results show that T3L-DS provides an effective distributed approach to DEOSP.

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Qian Yin, Xinwei Wang, Guohua Wu. 2026-08-14. Task-Driven Three-Layer Distributed Scheduling for Emergency Earth Observation in Large Low-Earth-Orbit Constellations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14789

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