Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Challenges in Earth Observation Satellite Constellations

We identify several challenges and opportunities opened to agent and multiagent systems, following the recent developments in the domain of Earth observation constellations. We focus on three challenge categories that manifest in this field: (i) configuration problems of constellations and ground stations used to operate them, potentially owned by different actors, as to provide better services and coordination; (ii) offline planning and scheduling problems, which consist in finding solution methods to schedule observation and upload/download tasks over the constellation; (iii) the design of efficient and reactive online operation methods as to adapt schedules in dynamic settings. Being naturally distributed and composed of multiple entities and users, these problems clearly fit the multiagent paradigm, and may challenge researchers for many years.