Optimal fuel station arrangement for multiple GEO spacecraft refueling mission

Abstract

This paper investigates an optimal fuel station (FS) arrangement problem for multiple geosynchronous (GEO) spacecrafts with many-to-many (M2M) refueling, subject to the capacity of the servicing spacecraft (SSC) and the different fuel requirements of the targets. Several FSs with their reusable SSC are arranged on GEO, while the SSC commutes between fuel-deficient targets and FSs to refuel the multiple targets. To avoid building a fuel station at the exact position of the target in traditional M2M refueling, the problem is formulated as a location–allocation problem. Based on that, a novel modified K-means clustering is proposed, in which the difficulty caused by the limitation of the SSC’s capacity is solved. With the proposed method, the FS is allowed to be arranged in the exact region without inaccessible targets, where the minimum number of the required FS and the minimized fuel cost are determined in turn. Finally, numerical simulations validate the performance of the proposed method.