Image Acquisition Planning for Earth Observation Satellites with a Quantum Annealer

We present a comparison study of state-of-the-art classical optimisation methods to a D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer for the planning of Earth observation missions. The problem is to acquire high value images while obeying the attitude manoeuvring constraint of the satellite. In order to investigate close to real-world problems, we created benchmark problems by simulating realistic scenarios. Our results show that a tuned quantum annealing approach can run faster than a classical exact solver for some of the problem instances. Moreover, we find that the solution quality of the quantum annealer is comparable to the heuristic method used operationally for small problem instances, but degrades rapidly due to the limited precision of the quantum annealer.