The Synchronized Position Hold Engage Reorient Experimental Satellites (SPHERES) program, developed by the MIT Space Systems Laboratory, began operations aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in May 2006. SPHERES was designed as a research facility to demonstrate metrology, control, and autonomy algorithms for distributed satellite systems. By operating in the risktolerant environment of...

This work is an example of application of nonlinear programming to a problem of three-dimensional trajectory optimization for multistage launch vehicles for geostationary orbit missions. The main objective is to minimize fuel consumption or equivalently to maximize the payload. The launch vehicle considered here, Europa-II, consists of 5 thrust phases and 2 coast phases. Major parameters of the...

In this paper, a new conceptual approach for flight schedule construction will be developed. Until now, the construction of a flight schedule is performed by decomposing the overall problem into subproblems and by solving these subproblems with various optimization techniques. The new approach constructs flight schedules with the help of genetic algorithms. Each individual of a population repre...

Traditional QFD planning method compromises contradictions between engineering characteristics to achieve higher customer satisfaction. However, this compromise trade-off can not eliminate the contradictions existing among the engineering characteristics which limited the overall customer satisfaction. QFD (Quality function deployment) integrated with TRIZ (the Russian acronym of the Theory of ...

The problem of flight delay prediction is approached most often by predicting a class or value. However, the aviation industry can benefit greatly from probabilistic predictions on an individual basis, as these give insight into uncertainty predictions. Therefore, in this study, two forecasting algorithms, Mixture Density Networks and Random Forest regression, are applied to predict delays at E...

The paper presents a theory for flight dynamic analysis of highly flexible flying wing configurations. The analysis takes into account large aircraft motion coupled with geometrically nonlinear structural deformation subject only to a restriction to small strain. A large motion aerodynamic loads model is integrated into the analysis. The analysis can be used for complete aircraft analysis inclu...

We propose a new nature inspired metaheuristic approach based on the V flight formation of the migrating birds which is proven to be an effective formation in energy saving. Its performance is tested on quadratic assignment problem instances arising from a real life problem and very good results are obtained. The quality of the solutions we report are better than simulated annealing, tabu searc...