  Space missions are characterized by long distances, difficult or unavailable
communication and high operating costs. Moreover, complexity has been
constantly increasing in recent years. For this reason, improving the autonomy
of space operators is an attractive goal to increase the mission reward with
lower costs. This paper proposes an onboard scheduler, that integrates inside
an onboard software framework for mission autonomy. Given a set of activities,
it is responsible for determining the starting time of each activity according
to their priority, order constraints, and resource consumption. The presented
scheduler is based on linear integer programming and relies on the use of a
branch-and-cut solver. The technology has been tested on an Earth Observation
scenario, comparing its performance against the state-of-the-art scheduling
technology.
