MIDACO software performance on interplanetary trajectory benchmarks
Abstract A numerical study of the MIDACO optimization software on the well known GTOP benchmark set, published by the European Space Agency (ESA), is presented. The GTOP database provides trajectory models of real-world interplanetary space missions such as Cassini, Messenger or Rosetta. The trajectory models are formulated as constrained nonlinear optimization problems and are known to be difficult to solve. Here a comprehensive and rigorous numerical analysis of the MIDACO out-of-the-box performance on the GTOP benchmark set is presented and discussed. In the past, the putative best known solutions of these benchmarks often required several months and even years to be found. In this contribution it will be shown, that MIDACO is able to solve five out of seven of these benchmarks to their best known solution within minutes to hours.