Optimal Velocity Requirements for Earth to Venus Mission Using Taboo Evolutionary Programming

Abstract

In the recent years stochastic optimization techniques have seen a remarkable development for many scientific and industrial problems. There has been growing interest in the successful use of these techniques for obtaining the global optimum of a given optimization problem. Many authors proposed different methods of optimization techniques and applied on a variety of problems. The difficulty in global optimization increases with the dimension of the problem and the presence of multiple local minima. Taboo evolutionary programming (TEP) is a novel evolutionary programming technique, which found extensive usage in the present decade. TEP is an effective global optimization technique which avoids entrapment in local minima and to continue the search to give the optimal solution independent of the initial conditions. The algorithm can be effectively implemented on any complex problem to find the optimum solution with many constraints. Successful use of TEP is published in terms of exploring efficiently the solution space by providing optimal solutions and good initial estimation.

In the present study TEP algorithm is used to find the optimum impulsive velocity requirements for a complex interplanetary trajectory from Earth to Venus mission. The optimization problem is complex due to the presence of the multiple local minima exists in a given synodic cycle. TEP algorithm is integrated with analytic technique called Lambert conic determination. Two types of missions namely flyby and orbiter are considered to explore the optimum trajectory opportunities from elliptical Earth parking orbit. To demonstrate the superiority of TEP, the results were compared with Genetic Algorithm (GA) also.