Moving-target traveling Salesman Problem applied to multiple rendezvous trajectories

Abstract

Active Debris Removal (ADR) refers to the activity to remove inoperative spacecraft from their current orbit, in order to ensure that their orbital paths remain safe for other spacecraft. This activity has been demonstrated to be paramount in order to ensure the sustainability of highly demanded orbits, such as the geo-stationary ring and sun-synchronous orbits. However, in order to make ADR a sustainable activity as well, the removal spacecraft must be designed to be able to remove several spacecraft during its mission lifetime. This type of trajectory design problem resembles the so-called moving-target travelling salesman problem, though can not be over-defined. Thus, this thesis explores various meta-heuristic optimization techniques.