SPACE LOGISTICS: APPLICATIONS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH TO IN-SPACE INFRASTRUCTURE DESIGN

There is a growing number of proposed and on-going activities in space that constitute paradigm shifts.

These are, for example, satellite mega-constellations, on-orbit servicing, space tugs, space situational awareness (SSA) activities, or the crewed lunar campaign spearheaded by the Artemis program and the Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS).

Designing, deploying, and operating these in-space infrastructures necessitate new approaches that go beyond the traditional "one-shot" mission design.

The field of Space Logistics aims to develop modelling and optimisation techniques that provide strategic decisions and insights into the design space of large-scale in-space infrastructures.

This seminar will specifically focus on the application of the facility location problem (FLP) - an optimization framework employed traditionally for finding optimal locations of infrastructures such as warehouses, distribution centres, or hospitals - to problems in the space domain.

We will specifically focus on two applications: the placement of on-orbit servicing depots in MEO, and the placement of observation satellites for Cislunar SSA.

A key distinctive feature of space logistics from terrestrial applications is the nonlinearity associated with spacecraft orbits; in the presented applications, we will also introduce discretization and precomputation procedures that accommodate the use of binary linear program formulations and techniques.

Speaker:

Yuri Shimane is a PhD candidate at the Space Systems Optimization Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interest lies at the intersection of space logistics and astrodynamics, drawing optimization techniques from operations research to design and optimize space-based assets under astrodynamics and/or operational considerations. In the past, he worked on the design of low-energy transfers to low-lunar orbits as part of the mission analysis team at ispace in Tokyo, as well on cislunar optical navigation and station-keeping on NRHO at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Cambridge, MA. This summer, he is working on the rendez-vous guidance and control for on-orbit servicing missions in GEO at Infinite Orbits in Toulouse.

19.07.2024