A Global Approach to Optimal Space Trajecotry Design

In this paper a combination of Evolution Programming and Branching is used to solve some typical problems in space trajectory design: finding a number of possible minimum cost transfers, including the global one, between two celestial bodies. The idea is to use a limited population evolving for a small number of generations, according to some specific evolution rules, in subregions of the solution space defined by a branching procedure. On the other hand the branching rules are functions of the outcome from the local evolution optimization. The proposed combined systematic-heuristic global optimization performs quite well on the analyzed cases suggesting the possibility of more complex application in space trajectory design.