Knowledge Fusion Design Method: Satellite Module Layout

As a complex engineering problem, the satellite module layout design (SMLD) is difficult to resolve by using conventional computation-based approaches. The challenges stem from three aspects: computational complexity, engineering complexity, and engineering practicability. Engineers often finish successful satellite designs by way of their plenty of experience and wisdom, lessons learnt from the past practices, as well as the assistance of the advanced computational techniques. Enlightened by the ripe patterns, this article puts forward a knowledge fusion approach, which fuses online human knowledge, prior knowledge, and computational knowledge by using evolutionary computation to fully explore the advantages of human and computers. This article highlights the way to represent aforementioned three types of design knowledge, the model to describe problem and the method to fuse, and the roles human plays. The numerical experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed approach.