  We investigate the use of multi-agent allocation techniques on problems
related to Earth observation scenarios with multiple users and satellites. We
focus on the problem of coordinating users having reserved exclusive orbit
portions and one central planner having several requests that may use some
intervals of these exclusives. We define this problem as Earth Observation
Satellite Constellation Scheduling Problem (EOSCSP) and map it to a Mixed
Integer Linear Program. As to solve EOSCSP, we propose market-based techniques
and a distributed problem solving technique based on Distributed Constraint
Optimization (DCOP), where agents cooperate to allocate requests without
sharing their own schedules. These contributions are experimentally evaluated
on randomly generated EOSCSP instances based on real large-scale or highly
conflicting observation order books.
