Abstract: The difficulty of satellite module layout design (SMLD) lies in its engineering complexity and combinatorial explosion of computational complexity. Many engineering applications show that the SMLD might be solved well by human-computer cooperation. A human-computer cooperative ant colony/genetic algorithm (HCAGA) is proposed. Artificial individuals are integrated with algorithm individuals by the unified code form and are operated in the individuals’ population. The artificial individual’s added occasion is controlled automatically by computer or by human based on the visualization interaction. The proposed algorithm is compared with parallel genetic algorithm (PGA) and ant colony optimization (ACO) on a simplified three-dimensional satellite module layout design example. The results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to the PGA and ACO on obtaining the engineer satisfactory solutions’ quality and computation efficiency.

Key words: Ant colony algorithm, Human-computer cooperation, Layout design, Satellite