Aas 07-151 a Network Flow Formulation for an Egalitarian P2p Satellite Refueling Strategy

A variation of the P2P strategy, known as egalitarian P2P (E-P2P) refueling strategy, relaxes the restriction on the active satellites to return to their original orbital slots after undergoing the fuel transactions. The E-P2P refueling problem can be formulated as a three-index assignment problem on an undirected tripartite constellation graph, which can be solved using, say, a Greedy Random Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP). In this paper we consider again the E-P2P problem, which we formulate as a minimum cost flow problem on a directed graph, along with some additional constraints. The solution of the corresponding integer program yields the optimal satellite assignment.