Exploring Goal Relationships in Satellite Assembly Line Design

Anouck Chan, Thomas Polacsek, Stéphanie Roussel

Abstract: With the emergence of satellite constellations in recent years, satellite assembly lines have to respond to new demand : produce multiple copies of the same satellite at short production rates, manage multiple production rates for different constellations, but also continue to produce specific satellites in a single copy over longer time horizons. Designing versatile assembly lines that can assemble multiple types of satellites is a major challenge for manufacturers. Such lines must be designed within the existing infrastructure and with the specific required machines and tools, which must be shared between assembly activities for all types of satellites. In this work, we are interested in eliciting the goals of a versatile assembly chain from the perspective of goal-requirement modelling. More specifically, we want to determine which goals might conflict with each other. To do this, we propose to elicit the different goals and then use a constraint programming approach to compute if some goals are difficult to satisfy together.