On the Computational Complexity of Peer-to-Peer Satellite Refueling Strategies

Abstract

We revisit the peer-to-peer on-orbit satellite refueling problem, in which the maneuvering satellites are allowed to interchange their orbital positions. We show that the problem is computationally hard by reducing it to a special case of the three-index assignment problem. On the positive side, we show that the size of instances in practice is such that a state-of-the-art integer programming solver is able to find globally optimal solutions in little computing time.