On-orbit refueling robust mission scheduling with uncertain duration for geosynchronous orbit spacecraft

With the increasing number of geosynchronous orbit satellites with expiring lifetime, spacecraft refueling is crucial in enhancing the economic benefits of on-orbit services. The existing studies tend to be based on predetermined refueling duration; however, the precise mission scheduling solution will be difficult to apply due to uncertain refueling duration caused by orbital transfer deviations and stochastic actuator faults during actual on-orbit service. Therefore, this paper proposes a robust mission scheduling strategy for geosynchronous orbit spacecraft on-orbit refueling missions with uncertain refueling duration. Firstly, a robust mission scheduling model is constructed by introducing the budget uncertainty set to describe the uncertain refueling duration. Secondly, a hybrid harris hawks optimization algorithm is designed to explore the optimal mission allocation and refueling sequences, which combines cubic chaotic mapping to initialize the population, and the crossover in the genetic algorithm is introduced to enhance global convergence. Finally, the typical simulation examples are constructed with real-mission scenarios in three aspects to analyze: performance comparisons with various algorithms; robustness analyses via comparisons of different on-orbit refueling durations; investigations into the impacts of different initial population strategies on algorithm performance, demonstrating the proposed mission scheduling framework’s robustness and effectiveness by comparing it with the exact mission scheduling.