Optimal Design of Earth-Mars Low-Thrust Trajectory Transfer Based on Ordinal Optimization Theory

Most direct techniques for solving low-thrust optimization problems involve control variables parametrization at some points in the optimization process. Some instances, however, does not possess the necessary information that determine the ranges of the parameters. Even the ranges are known, huge magnitudes of the ranges often result in convergence to local minimum or even a failure of convergence. For such cases, the ordinal optimization (OO) theory can be used to narrow the ranges of the parameters impressively. In this paper, the Earth-Mars low-thrust trajectory transfer optimization problem is illustrated by applying the OO method with the parameter's range narrowing.