Comparative Analysis of Functions Objective in the Optimization of Orbital SAR Data Acquisition for Areas of Interest

The acquisition of data by orbital Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors is relevant for monitoring large, remote areas or areas subject to atmospheric limitations, as it enables imaging under cloud cover and different illumination conditions. Planning these acquisitions involves selecting a subset from the available opportunities, considering the coverage of the area of interest, the number of windows, and spatial overlap. This work analyzes three ways of formulating the objective function of this problem. The first corresponds to the weighted formulation adopted as a reference, while the other two represent distinct perspectives: priority to coverage and priority to reducing the number of windows. The single-objective Genetic Algorithm is maintained as the search mechanism in the analyses. The results show that different ways of establishing priorities lead to solutions with distinct characteristics and allow discussion of the influence of modeling on the relationship between spatial performance and operational effort.