Preliminary Design and Optimisation of a CubeSat Platform for a Multi-Experiment Technology Demonstration

CubeSat platforms are an increasingly relevant instrument for technology demonstration, offering a cost-effective and modular approach to design phase and mission development. This study focuses on the preliminary design of a multi-experiment CubeSat platform developed within the framework of Phase A for ASI's EXCITE, with a particular emphasis on subsystem's components selection and configuration analysis. For the selection of COTS components, the design of the communications subsystem is used as an example, after assessments made on the optimal architecture for the on-board system and the ground segment. During the design phase, the selection of components for each subsystem can be approached as a Multi Criteria Decision Making problem where the objective is to choose the best alternative (in this case, an object extracted from a database) by evaluating several features at once, each with a different weight according to its relative importance. On the other hand, the spatial arrangement of subsystem components within the CubeSat can be treated as a constrained bin packing problem, where the objective is to distribute components efficiently to use available space without conflict while maximising subsystem performances. Since the problem is NP-hard, an algorithm has been proposed in which the optimization process can be approached in a metaheuristic way, to find satisfactory sub-optimal architectures during the design phase.