Space station overall mission planning using decomposition approach

During a space station operation scenario, there are complicated interaction relationships and restrictions between different types of operation missions, including on-orbit experiment arrangements, crew rotation, selection of flying orbit, and the cargo vehicle resupplying strategies. The space station overall mission planning, considering all the operation missions concurrently and comprising the launch window constraints of visiting vehicles, is focused on obtaining appropriate operation arrangements, improving program utilisation capability, and minimising lifecycle operation cost. A hierarchical, three-level, decomposed framework is proposed to model the overall mission planning problem, in which the first-level problem deals with the top-level mission scenario parameters, the second-level problem deals with the vehicle visiting strategy, and the third-level problem deals with the flying orbital missions. In accordance with the hierarchical problem framework, the planning approaches for each level problem are analysed and developed. Furthermore, the integrated planning procedure for the overall planning problem is formulated. The results prove that planning different operation missions concurrently is helpful in satisfying the complicated constraints, thus improving program benefit and decreasing operation cost, and it is essential and more practical to consider launch window constraints in the planning model.