Abstract: Objective Traditional satellite scheduling method has difficulties to meet the need for timely responsein emergency observation missions.In this paper,an improved single-orbit scheduling method is pro-posed for agile imaging satellites as a tentative solution.This method first dynamically calculates theobservation angle,swath,and duration of the agile imaging satellite.Cutting of area targets are thenperformed using parallel strip,followed by the acquisition of minimum attitude transition time.A spe-cialized step-size search algorithm is employed to find the best observation point towards the area tar-get.In our experiments,the STK simulation scenario is constructed with four agile imaging satellites.The simulation results show that the new method improves the coverage of area target while reducesthe image acquisition time.