Early Mission Design of Transfers to Halo Orbits via Particle Swarm Optimization

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to prune the search space of a low-thrust trajectory transfer from a high-altitude, Earth orbit to a Lagrange point orbit in the Earth-Moon system. Unlike a gradient based approach, this evolutionary PSO algorithm is capable of avoiding undesirable local minima. The PSO method is extended to a “local” version and uses a two dimensional search space that is capable of reducing the computation run-time by an order of magnitude when compared with published work. A technique for choosing appropriate PSO parameters is demonstrated and an example of an optimized trajectory is discussed.