Cost Effective Persistent Regional Surveillance with Reconfigurable Satellite Constellations
Abstract
Space-based persistent surveillance provides decision makers with information necessary to effectively respond to both natural and man-made crises. This paper investigates a reconfigurable constellation strategy that utilizes on-demand, maneuverable satellites to provide on-demand focused regional coverage with short revisit times at greatly decreased cost when compared to traditional static satellite constellations. A general framework is introduced to guide the design and optimization of reconfigurable satellite constellations specifically tailored to stakeholder objectives while considering requirement uncertainty. The framework consists of three elements: a detailed simulation model to compute constellation performance and cost, Monte Carlo simulation, and a parallel multi-objective evolutionary algorithm developed from the xF;-NSGA-II genetic algorithm. Additionally, a new persistence metric is developed to directly measure how well a design meets desired temporal and spatial sampling requirements and a decision model and optimal assignment process is developed to determine how to employ the option of reconfigurability to respond to specific regional events. 8 optimization runs were performed on a 1024 processor computing cluster to compare the cost-effectiveness of several constellation architectures over varied coverage requirements. Results show that reconfigurable constellations cost 20 to 70% less than similarly performing static constellations for the scenarios studied, and this cost savings grows with increasingly demanding coverage requirements
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 24, 2015
- Accession Number
- AD1034975
Entities
People
- David W. Miller
- Robert S. Jr Legge
Organizations
- MIT Lincoln Laboratory