Abstract
A mission of the U.S. Air Force Space Command is the positioning of Global Positioning System satellites to improve the accuracy of receiver navigation solutions. To that end, a technique is developed that, given a configuration specifying the number of satellites in each orbital plane, combines a nonlinear program with a simulation to find the constellation that optimizes performance. This approach is greatly expedited by a reduced set of configuration classes, which will result in significantly increased efficiency in computer runtime and constellation management. Additionally, a metric is proposed for constellation performance that normalizes receiver dilution of precision accuracy values and weights trouble spots. A tool implementing the technique and the metric is constructed and applied to three configurations. The first includes the nominal 24-satellite operational constellation, and the other two are for 27 and 31 satellites. For the 24-satellite configuration, satellite positions similar to the nominal constellation are obtained (less than 4° average shift in argument of latitude) and have an improved performance according to at least two metrics, including the new one. This suggests that this approach will be useful for determining unique operationally realistic placement of satellites for other configurations.
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