Optimal design and reconfiguration of flower constellations: An application to global disaster management

Abstract

Unpredictable natural disasters are inevitable, and creating a communication satellite constellation that can continuously cover the entire Earth during disasters seems practically impossible. On the other hand, building up dedicated constellations associated with disaster areas does not make sense, either technically or temporally. This paper presents an optimal approach to providing timely and continuous communication coverage by optimal design and reconfiguration of flower constellations (FCs). In particular, the proposed approach addresses the optimal design of an FC and its formation by optimal satellites’ transfer from the last constellation and the remaining satellites from the previous reconfigurations. The multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (NSGA-II) is used to find optimal FC designs that minimize the height of perigee while simultaneously minimizing the number of satellites. In addition, the optimum assignment for transferring satellites to the designed FC is to minimize the total Δv for the reconfiguration by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. In the end, the feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated by comparison optimal results.