Operation strategy optimization for on-orbit satellite subsystems considering multiple active switching

Abstract

To improve the reliability of satellites, there are many standby configurations in the key subsystems. Concerning the on-orbit operation of standby systems, the standby units usually switch to the operating state after the active units fail. However, a periodic switching strategy differing from this common strategy is employed for the gyroscope warm standby system of satellite in engineering. For this problem, a multiple active switching policy for standby units is considered, and the on-orbit operation strategy optimization problem is studied. First, the multiple active switching process of the gyroscope warm standby system and the virtual age theory are described. Second, under the imperfect and non-periodic multiple active switching strategy, the reliability function and mean time to failure (MTTF) of the warm standby system are derived based on the binary decision diagram (BDD) with units following arbitrary lifetime distributions. Furthermore, an operation optimization model is proposed by maximizing the MTTF of the warm standby system to obtain the optimal switching numbers and corresponding time points. Finally, a numerical example of the gyroscope warm standby system under the Weibull distribution is presented to show the application of the model, and a sensitivity analysis is carried out to identify the useful conclusions.