Preliminary design of multi-chaser active debris removal missions with evolutionary algorithms

This paper deals with the preliminary design of an active debris removal mission in Earth's orbit, where multiple active spacecraft are used to remove all the space debris belonging to a given cluster. The problem is posed as a purely combinatorial optimization problem and dealt with a Genetic Algorithm (GA). A novel permutation-based encoding, specifically designed to allow the simultaneous optimization of the sequence of targets, their distribution among the chaser spacecraft, and the selection of the best rendezvous epochs, is presented. Special permutation-preserving operators are introduced to improve the convergence capabilities of GA. Numerical results are presented for a case study involving a few dozens of debris and up to four chasers.