Designing optimal low-thrust gravity-assist trajectories using space pruning and a multi-objective approach

A multi-objective problem is addressed consisting of finding optimal low-thrust gravity-assist trajectories for interplanetary and orbital transfers. For this, recently developed pruning techniques for incremental search space reduction - which will be extended for the current situation - in combination with subdivision techniques for the approximation of the entire solution set, the so-called Pareto set, are used. Subdivision techniques are particularly promising for the numerical treatment of these multi-objective design problems since they are characterized (amongst others) by highly disconnected feasible domains, which can easily be handled by these set oriented methods. The complexity of the novel pruning techniques is analysed, and finally the usefulness of the novel approach is demonstrated by showing some numerical results for two realistic cases.