Internship / Multi-objective interactive mission planning for earth observation (m/f)

Description de l'offre

Internship / Multi-objective interactive mission planning for earth observation (m/f)

Airbus Defence & Space Toulouse (ex Astrium SL)

Airbus Defence and Space is a division of Airbus Group, formed by combining the business activities of Cassidian, Astrium and Airbus Military. This new division is the leading aerospace and defence company in Europe, it represents the second largest company in the space field and is among the ten best international defence companies. It employs some 40,000 people and records a turnover of approximately 14 billion euros per year.

Airbus Group is a global leader in aeronautics, space and related services. In 2015, the Group - comprising Airbus, Airbus Defence and Space and Airbus Helicopters - generated revenues of € 64.5 billion and employed a workforce of around 136,600.

Our people work with passion and determination to make the world a more connected, safer and smarter place. Taking pride in our work, we draw on each other's expertise and experience to achieve excellence. Our diversity and teamwork culture propel us to accomplish the extraordinary - on the ground, in the sky and in space.

Description of the job

Airbus Defence and Space (Toulouse) is looking for an intern for a 6-month internship.

The mission of Earth Observation satellites is to acquire data (image, radar acquisition…) in response to requests coming from various users.
Mission planning consists in computing the set of actions to be performed by the satellite at all times, according to the request properties and the systems limitations: kinematics, on-board memory, download capacity...
Mission planning is therefore a constrained optimization problem with multiple objectives:

·  Maximize the capacity, i.e. the amount of Earth surface acquired during a given programming period,
·  Satisfy at most the user requests based on their priority,
·  Based on forecasted (therefore uncertain) weather conditions, maximize the chances that the acquired data will have an acceptable cloud coverage,
·  Minimize the age of information, i.e. the delay from the submission of the imaging request to the delivery of the final image product.

These objectives are most often conflicting as a planning solution cannot be best-in-class for all objectives.
Mission Planning algorithms implemented in current Earth Observation systems proceed with a number of simplifications to offer a compromise on run-time performance. In particular:

·  The objectives are translated into scores and combined together through heuristics to form a single score,
·  The acquisition opportunities computed from the user requests are ranked by decreasing order of score, and a greedy algorithm attempts to insert them one after the one in the satellite work-plan.

During your internship, you will be assisted by Mission engineers and system operators. Simulation tools, default scenarios and reference algorithms will be provided by Airbus Defence & Space to support the studies.
In addition, you will have the opportunity to acquire significant knowledge on Earth Observation satellites and ground segments, while getting familiar with the management of R&D projects in our industry.

This internship will start on 3rd April 2017 (subject to some flexibility).

Internships at Airbus

Profil recherché

Tasks & accountabilities

Your responsibilities will include:

·  Improving upon existing algorithms through multi-objective optimization techniques. The different objectives will be assessed independently of each other with an analysis and estimation of the corresponding Pareto front. Different optimization approaches will be considered, including the traditional greedy algorithms and more advanced schemes already studied prior to the internship.
·  Investigating specific routines to make the planning algorithm interactive: different planning strategies will be presented to operators, each providing different advantages / drawbacks with respect to the planning objectives. If time allows, an interactive loop will allow operators to steer the proposed work-plan towards the desired objective by moving the solution on the Pareto front.

Required skills

You are in the final year of a Master's Degree or of an Engineering School specialising in / Engineering / Aerospace Engineering.

You ideally have initial experience.

You have knowledge in:

·  Applied mathematics, with a specialization in optimization problems,
·  Computer science: algorithms and data structures, development in Matlab, Java or C++.

You ideally have knowledge of space systems and Earth-observation missions.

You are a good team player and have excellent interpersonal skills.

English: Negotiation level,
French: Negotiation level.