2008, ’Designing optimal low thrust gravity assist trajectories using space pruning and a multi-objective approach’, Engineering Optimization

In this work we address a multi-objective problem of finding optimal low thrust gravity assist trajec-tories for interplanetary and orbital transfers. For this, we use recently developed pruning techniques for incremental search space reduction – which we will extend for the current situation – in combi-nation with subdivision techniques for the approximation of the Pareto sets. These techniques are particularly promising for the numerical treatment of these multi-objective design problems since they are characterised (amongst others) by highly disconnected feasible domains, which can easily be handled by these set oriented methods. We analyse the complexity of the novel pruning tech-niques, and finally demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by showing some numerical results on two realistic cases. August 17, 2007 10:23 Engineering Optimization ltgasp-final