Postdoc (M/F) Offline/online decision-making for orienteering problems under uncertainty and application to Earth observation satellites

id="offer-description" class="ecl-u-type-heading-2 ecl-u-mt-none ecl-u-mb-l">Offer Description The mission of Earth Observation Satellites (EOSs) consists in performing acquisitions of candidate ground areas on Earth. From an Operations Research perspective, optimizing the activities of such satellites can be seen as a Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TOPTW) where the vehicles are the satellites available, the customers to visit are the candidate ground areas, the vehicle transition times correspond to the duration of the maneuvers required to point a satellite to specific observation directions, and the time windows correspond to the time frames during which the satellites flight over the areas of interest.In practice, several sources of uncertainty must be managed when planning the activities of such satellites, such as the actual amount of resources (energy or memory) available at execution time, the actual duration of the maneuvers, the presence of clouds invalidating observation data, or the arrival of urgent requests related to natural disasters or security issues. For this purpose, several approaches are used in the literature: (a) proactive scheduling, where a schedule is built based on constraints and/or objective functions anticipating disturbances; (b) reactive scheduling, where fast algorithms adapt/repair a solution in reaction to new conditions; (c) mixed proactive/reactive scheduling that integrates the two approaches by building a robust schedule o