A combination method using evolutionary algorithms in initial orbit determination for too short arc

With the combination of two evolutionary algorithms EDA and DE, a new method of initial orbit determination for satellites based on ground-based too-short-arc is established. Compared with other algorithms, the proposed method focuses on the most densely populated region in the solution space rather than the individual with best fitness value. Both the global information and local information are well fused in the search of optimum. In the method (a, e, M) are treated as variables of the optimization, and the optimization procedure is carried out as a two-stage hierarchical optimization problem which has three variables for each stage. Kernel density estimation is applied to build the probability distribution model without any assumptions of the specified distribution, accompanied by handling semi-major axis and eccentricity as a pair of dependent variables in the construction of the probability for the correlation between them in the practice. Numerical experiments with real ground-based observations show that the proposed method is applicable to too-short-arc with even 3 s, and the result of bias in several kilometers can be achieved with 5 '' error added to angular measurements. (C) 2018 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.