Integer Programming for Optimal Control of Geostationary Station Keeping of Low-Thrust Satellites

International audienceIn this paper, a control scheme is elaborated to perform the station keeping of a geostationary satellite equipped with electric propulsion. The use of electric thrusters imposes to take into account some additional mutually exclusive constraints that can be reformulated as logical constraints. The optimal station keeping problem is thus not solved with classical methods, either direct or indirect, but is transformed into a linear integer programming problem. The linearised relative velocity of the satellite is computed and some constraints on this velocity are added to the station keeping problem. Simulation results validate the efficiency of the optimal control thrusts obtained with these methods