Concurrent Space-Based Observer Placement and Scheduling for Cislunar Space Domain Awareness

Overview & Synopsis

As interest in cislunar space grows, so does the need for space domain awareness (SDA) capabilities to safely support missions. To enhance cislunar SDA capabilities, the use of space-based observers has been proposed. Prior research has explored optimizing observer placement but has not considered scheduling limitations. We propose a mixed-integer linear programming formulation that concurrently optimizes the placement and scheduling of space-based observers for cislunar SDA. Our work considers three aspects of observer scheduling: sensor tasking, communication, and charging. We utilize a scenario-based approach that generalizes observer placement for unknown targets while applying scheduling constraints to each scenario. However, this problem quickly becomes difficult for commercial solvers to handle as the number of scenarios grows. As an alternative, a column generation approach is employed to introduce well-performing schedules into the problem for each orbital slot. A comparative analysis is performed across multiple instances to evaluate the performance of column generation against that of a commercial solver. A case study is then conducted in which the performance of the observers' placement from the concurrent formulation is tested against a set of validation target sets and compared with the performance of two baselines in which placement and scheduling are performed sequentially.