Hello all, I've been using GMAT in my free time to optimize trajectories, and have varied burn component values and spacecraft states, usually with success. The vary command in GMAT, with the Yukon optimizer that I am using, has the following parameters that can be changed:
* Initial value: The initial guess. I know the gradient descent optimization method that GMAT uses is very sensitive to initial conditions and so this must be feasible or reasonably close. * Perturbation: The step size used to calculate the finite difference derivative. * Max step: The maximum allowed change in the control variable during a single iteration of the solver. * Additive scale factor: Number used to nondimensionalize the independent variable. This is done with the equation xn = m (xd + a), where xn is the non-dimensional parameter, xd is the dimensional parameter and this parameter is a. * Multiplicative scale factor: Same as above, but it's the variable d in the equation. For the initial value, I can usually see when my chosen value is feasible by observing the solver window or a graphical display of the orbit in different iterations. The max step is the most intuitive of these parameters for me, and by trial and error, observation of the solver window and how sensitive my target variables are to changes in the control variables I can usually get it right and get convergence. It is still partially trial and error though. However, I do not understand the effect of the other parameters on the optimization. I read a bit about finite difference and nondimensionalization/rescaling, and I think I understand them conceptually, but I still don't understand what values they have to be to get an optimal optimization process. This is especially a problem now because I have started to vary epochs (TAIModJulian usually) or time intervals (e.g. "travel for x days" and find optimal x, or to find optimal launch windows), and I cannot get the optimizer to vary them properly, even when I use a large step size. The optimizer usually stays close to the initial values, and eventually leads to a non-convergence message. I have noticed that using large values for the two scale factors sometimes gives me larger step sizes and occasionally what I want, but it's still trial and error. As far as perturbation goes, I do not understand its influence on how the optimization works. Sometimes for extremely small values I get array dimension errors, sometimes for very large values I get similar results to if I'm using too large a max step size, and that's about it. I usually use 1e-5 to 1e-7 and it seems to work most of the time. So I guess my question is two-fold: how to understand the optimization parameters of GMAT and what they should be in different situations, and what should they be when I want GMAT to consider a wide array of possible trajectories with different values of control variables, especially when those control variables are epochs or time intervals? Is there a procedure or automatic method that takes into account the scale of the optimization problem and its sensitivity, and gives an estimate of what the optimization parameters should be? Best regards, Panagiotis Karakatsanis
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