Adaptive Ant Colony Algorithm for On-orbit Assembly Planning

On-orbit assembly of space structures has long been considered as a means of enabling the construction of large space platforms. An adaptive ant colony algorithm approach is presented to generate optimal sequences for on-orbit assembly planning of large space truss structures. The assembly sequences are considered from two levels: strut level and structural volume element (SVE) level. At the strut level, assembly sequences are represented by the connectivity matrix. And, at the SVE level, the directed graph representation is used to guarantee the feasibility conditions of assembly tasks. Furthermore, an adaptive ant colony algorithm is improved to plan assembly sequences of large space truss structures. This algorithm is based on adaptive updating of pheromone. Finally, a case shows that the comparison of converged iterations of adaptive ant colony algorithm and basic ant colony algorithm, and illustrates the effectiveness of the approach.