4. Conclusion

The great flexibility of the AltaRica tool allows reliability engineers to participate in the architectural choices concerning the system. As this study shows, it is possible to evaluate the impact of different satellite architectures on constellation performance. Computation times are acceptable. Generating the AltaRica code with the 1,800 observers to simulate the constellation and compiling it in AltaRica takes around 10 minutes (using an 11th generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1165G7 @ 2.80GHz, 2803 MHz, 4 cores, 8 logic processors). The 10,000 trajectories are calculated in less than 3 minutes, enabling the system to be modified and the new performance capabilities to be obtained rapidly. The tool is therefore ideal for comparing the performance capabilities of different system architectures.

One weakness, however, remains the relative complexity of the implementation....