A Note on Peer-to-Peer Satellite Refueling Strategies

Abstract

We revisit the peer-to-peer refueling problem, in which the maneuvering satellites are allowed to interchange their orbital positions [2]. We show that the problem is computationally hard, by reducing it to a special case of the three-index assignment problem. On the positive side, we show that the size of instances from practice is such that a state-of-theart integer programming solver is able to find optimal solutions in little computing time.