Minimum energy maneuvering strategies for multiple satellite inspection missions

Determining optimum maneuvering strategies for multiple satellite inspection is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem that is related to the classical traveling salesman problem (TSP). The classical TSP and its variants cannot be solved to optimality in polynomial time due to the vastness of the solution space. Global search techniques that use a stochastic engine to explore diverse regions of the solution space (such as genetic algorithms or simulated annealing) have been employed with great success against such problems. This paper presents a technique for solving this problem using a hybrid genetic algorithm, and provides results of algorithm performance against a representative multi-satellite inspection problem. Preliminary test runs of the algorithm show excellent performance against 30-satellite problems