Approximate Solutions in Space Mission Design

In this paper, we address multi-objective space mission design problems. From a practical point of view, it is often the case that, during the preliminary phase of the design of a space mission, the solutions that are actually considered are not ’optimal’ (in the Pareto sense) but belong to the basin of attraction of optimal ones (i.e. they are nearly optimal). This choice is motivated either by additional requirements that the decision maker has to take into account or, more often, by robustness considerations. For this, we suggest a novel MOEA which is a modification of the well-known NSGA-II algorithm equipped with a recently proposed archiving strategy which aims at storing the set of approximate solutions of a given MOP. Using this algorithm we will examine some space trajectory design problems and demonstrate the benefit of the novel approach.