Minimizing the Cost of Availability of Navigation Services from a Constellation of Satellites

A model is developed to minimize the life cycle cost of a system providing availability of services from a constellation of satellites. The model consists of a cost model, and a performance model. The cost model includes the cost of purchasing and maintaining an inventory of satellites and launch vehicles, launch operations, and on orbit operations. The performance model evaluates the availability over geographic grid averaging areas over a given period of time. Availability of navigation accuracy was analyzed and benchmarked against trade study and local optimization techniques. Depending on the definition of service availability the global optimization techniques were able to reduce the life cycle cost from 2% up to 17% or 134 – 436 $ (10) over the trade study and local optimization techniques.