With continuous expansion of satellite applications, the requirements for satellite communication services, such as communication delay, transmission bandwidth, transmission power consumption, and communication coverage, are becoming higher. This paper first presents an overview of the current development status of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, and then conducts a demand analysis for multi-satellite data transmission based on LEO satellite constellations. The problem is described, and the challenges and difficulties of the problem are analyzed accordingly. On this basis, a multi-satellite data-transmission mathematical model is then constructed. Combining classical heuristic allocating strategies on the features of the proposed model, with the reinforcement learning algorithm Deep Q-Network (DQN), a two-stage optimization framework based on heuristic and DQN is proposed. Finally, by taking into account the spatial and temporal distribution characteristics of satellite and facility resources, a multi-satellite scheduling instance dataset is generated. Experimental results validate the rationality and correctness of the DQN algorithm in solving the collaborative scheduling problem of multi-satellite data transmission.

An Electric Vehicle (EV) is an appropriate substitution for traditional transportation means for diminishing greenhouse gas emissions. However, decision-makers are beset by the limited driving range caused by the low battery capacity and the long recharging time. To resolve the former issue, several transportation companies increases the travel distance of the EV by establishing recharging stations in various locations. The proposed Electric Vehicle-Routing Problem with Time Windows (E-VRPTW) and recharging stations are constructed in this context; it augments the VRPTW by reinforcing battery capacity constraints. Meanwhile, super-recharging stations are gradually emerging in the surroundings. They can decrease the recharging time for an EV but consume more energy than regular stations. In this paper, we first extend the E-VRPRTW by adding the elements of super-recharging stations. We then apply a two-stage heuristic algorithm driven by a dynamic programming process to solve the new proposed problem to minimize the travel and total recharging costs. Subsequently, we compare the experimental results of this approach with other algorithms on several sets of benchmark instances. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of super-recharging stations on the total cost of the logistic plan.

This paper proposed a novel distributed memetic evolutionary model, where four modules distributed exploration, intensified exploitation, knowledge transfer, and evolutionary restart are coevolved to maximize their strengths and achieve superior global optimality. Distributed exploration evolves three independent populations by heterogenous operators. Intensified exploitation evolves an external elite archive in parallel with exploration to balance global and local searches. Knowledge transfer is based on a point-ring communication topology to share successful experiences among distinct search agents. Evolutionary restart adopts an adaptive perturbation strategy to control search diversity reasonably. Quantum computation is a newly emerging technique, which has powerful computing power and parallelized ability. Therefore, this paper further fuses quantum mechanisms into the proposed evolutionary model to build a new evolutionary algorithm, referred to as quantum-inspired distributed memetic algorithm (QDMA). In QDMA, individuals are represented by the quantum characteristics and evolved by the quantum-inspired evolutionary optimizers in the quantum hyperspace. The QDMA integrates the superiorities of distributed, memetic, and quantum evolution. Computational experiments are carried out to evaluate the superior performance of QDMA. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of special designs and show that QDMA has greater superiority compared to the compared state-of-the-art algorithms based on Wilcoxon’s rank-sum test. The superiority is attributed not only to good cooperative coevolution of distributed memetic evolutionary model, but also to superior designs of each special component.