Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Approach to Integrated Space Mission Planning and Spacecraft Design

Abstract

Space mission planning and spacecraft design are tightly coupled and need to be considered together for optimal performance; however, this integrated optimization problem results in a large-scale Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problem, which is challenging to solve. In response to this challenge, this paper proposes a new solution approach to this MINLP problem by iterative solving a set of coupled subproblems via the augmented Lagrangian coordination approach following the philosophy of Multi-disciplinary Design Optimization (MDO). The proposed approach leverages the unique structure of the problem that enables its decomposition into a set of coupled subproblems of different types: a Mixed-Integer Quadratic Programming (MIQP) subproblem for mission planning and one or more Nonlinear Programming (NLP) subproblem(s) for spacecraft design. Since specialized MIQP or NLP solvers can be applied to each subproblem, the proposed approach can efficiently solve the otherwise intractable integrated MINLP problem. An automatic and effective method to find