Vehicle Routing Problem Formulation for Efficient Tracking of Objects in Low Earth Orbit
Name
Vehicle Routing Problem Formulation for Efficient Tracking of Objects in Low Earth Orbit.pdf
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602.5 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
91891a580993bef94ce60b25224f8140
Author(s)
Shtofenmakher, Allan
Balakrishnan, Hamsa
Date Issued
January 3, 2025
Publisher
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Citation
Shtofenmakher, Allan and Balakrishnan, Hamsa. 2025. "Vehicle Routing Problem Formulation for Efficient Tracking of Objects in Low Earth Orbit."
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The increasing number of resident space objects (RSOs) in low Earth orbit (LEO) endangers the sustainable use of space and necessitates continuous surveillance to prevent collisions. The U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN) tracks tens of thousands of LEO RSOs using a suite of ground-based sensors; however, the algorithms that task and schedule these sensors have not improved significantly in the last twenty years. In that time, the number of catalogued LEO RSOs has more than doubled, calling for more efficient tasking algorithms. Prior research has primarily focused on improving the tasking of ground-based sensors for tracking RSOs in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO). In this paper, we extend recent work on a vehicle routing problem (VRP) formulation for optimal tasking and scheduling of ground-based radars for tracking GEO RSOs and apply it to tracking LEO RSOs. We introduce a modified VRP formulation, which features discrete time indexing and leverages sparse, binary feasibility matrices for reduced computation time, and present results for several simulations. We show that our approach can compute global and regional optima for tracking (a) 100 targets using 4 ground-based sensors over a 5-hour time horizon in under 5 minutes on a laptop computer and (b) 10,000 targets using 27 ground-based sensors over a 24-hour time horizon in about 4 hours on a high-performance computing cluster.
Description
AIAA SCITECH 2025 Forum, Session: Spacecraft and Launch Guidance, Navigation, and Control III 6-10 January 2025 Orlando, FL
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2025-0533
