Consensus-Based Auction Algorithm for Distributed Sensor Management in Space Object Tracking

The number of sensors for space situational awareness is limited, while a large number of space objects are in the catalogue. To efficiently and flexibly use a limited number of sensors, we propose to use the consensus-based distributed sensor management (CSM) algorithm for space object tracking. With CSM, information exchange is only required between neighbors, which avoids the limitations in centralized sensor management algorithms. The auction algorithm is used to select tracking tasks and the consensus algorithm is used to achieve agreements between different sensors. Typical scenarios, which use multiple Electro-Optical (EO) sensors to track multiple objects, are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed consensus-based auction algorithm (CBAA) algorithm.