Postdoc (M/F) Offline/online decision-making for orienteering problems under uncertainty and application to Earth observation satellites
New
- Researcher in FTC
- 21 months
- Doctorate
This offer is available in English version
This offer is open to people with a document recognizing their status as a disabled worker.
Offer at a glance
The Unit
Laboratoire d'analyse et d'architecture des systèmes
Contract Type
Researcher in FTC
Working hHours
Full Time
Workplace
31031 TOULOUSE
Contract Duration
21 months
Date of Hire
04/01/2027
Remuneration
between €3041 and €4216 gross per month, depending on experience
Apply Application Deadline : 19 November 2026 23:59
Job Description
Missions
The mission of Earth Observation Satellites (EOSs) consists in performing acquisitions of candidate ground areas on Earth. From an Operations Research perspective, optimizing the activities of such satellites can be seen as a Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TOPTW) where the vehicles are the satellites available, the customers to visit are the candidate ground areas, the vehicle transition times correspond to the duration of the maneuvers required to point a satellite to specific observation directions, and the time windows correspond to the time frames during which the satellites flight over the areas of interest.In practice, several sources of uncertainty must be managed when planning the activities of such satellites, such as the actual amount of resources (energy or memory) available at execution time, the actual duration of the maneuvers, the presence of clouds invalidating observation data, or the arrival of urgent requests related to natural disasters or security issues. For this purpose, several approaches are used in the literature: (a) proactive scheduling, where a schedule is built based on constraints and/or objective functions anticipating disturbances; (b) reactive scheduling, where fast algorithms adapt/repair a solution in reaction to new conditions; (c) mixed proactive/reactive scheduling that integrates the two approaches by building a robust schedule on the ground while anticipating the behavior of a lightweight reactive algorithm that will be applied onboard given a realized scenario, as in multi-stage stochastic or robust optimization.
Activity
The goal of the post-doc study is to go beyond the existing works by (a) considering orienteering problems involving several sources of uncertainty, contrarily to most of the works in the TOPTW literature that only deal with a single kind of uncertainty at a time (e.g., stochastic travel times or stochastic rewards but not both), (b) defining and comparing new proactive/reactive decision-making strategies and new associated solution formats ; on this point, examples of relevant directions are the combination of plan fragments from a catalog, plans composed of groups of permutable tasks or plans conditioned by resource thresholds. The models and algorithms developed will be tested both on problems obtained from academic TOPTW benchmarks and EOS management problems, using simulations to analyze both the efficiency and robustness given various execution scenarios.
Your Profil
Skills
PhD in Operations Research or Artificial Intelligence
Your Work Environment
The work will be performed in the context of an ANR project named OMNEOS dedicated to the definition of optimization methods for the newspace observation satellites and involving a newspace industrial partner in addition to LAAS-CNRS and ONERA.
Compensation and benefits
Compensation
between €3041 and €4216 gross per month, depending on experience
Annual leave and RTT
44 jours
Remote Working practice and compensation
Pratique et indemnisation du TT
Transport
Prise en charge à 75% du coût et forfait mobilité durable jusqu’à 300€
About the offer
| Offer reference | UPR8001-CHRART-003 |
|---|---|
| CN Section(s) / Research Area | Information sciences: bases of information technology, calculations, algorithms, representations, uses |
About the CNRS
The CNRS is a major player in fundamental research on a global scale. The CNRS is the only French organization active in all scientific fields. Its unique position as a multi-specialist allows it to bring together different disciplines to address the most important challenges of the contemporary world, in connection with the actors of change.
Create your alert
Don't miss any opportunity to find the job that's right for you. Register for free and receive new vacancies directly in your mailbox.