Multi-Fidelity Space Mission Planning and Infrastructure Design Framework for Space Resource Logistics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-fidelity optimization framework for space infrastructure and logistics design, enabling efficient trade studies for sustainable lunar exploration systems.

Contribution

It develops a novel multi-fidelity formulation for space infrastructure logistics that balances computational efficiency and solution accuracy.

Findings

Effective multi-fidelity optimization reduces computational costs.

Application to lunar exploration demonstrates practical value.

Framework captures subsystem interactions and external effects.

Abstract

To build a sustainable and affordable space transportation system for human space exploration, the design and deployment of space infrastructures are critical; one attractive and promising infrastructure system is the in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) system. The design analysis and trade studies for ISRU systems require the consideration of not only the design of the ISRU plant itself but also other infrastructure systems (e.g., storage, power) and various ISRU architecture options (e.g., resource, location, technology). This paper proposes a system-level space infrastructure and its logistics design optimization framework to perform architecture trade studies. A new space infrastructure logistics optimization problem formulation is proposed that considers infrastructure subsystems' internal interactions and their external synergistic effects with space logistics simultaneously. Since the full-size version of this proposed problem formulation can be computationally prohibitive, a new multi-fidelity optimization formulation is developed by varying the granularity of the commodity type definition over the network graph; this multi-fidelity formulation can find an approximation solution to the full-size problem computationally efficiently with little sacrifice in the solution quality. The proposed problem formulation and method are applied to a multi-mission lunar exploration campaign to demonstrate their values.