  Satellite constellation missions, consisting of a large number of spacecraft,
are increasingly being launched or planned. Such missions require novel control
approaches, in particular for what concerns orbital phasing maneuvers. In this
context, we consider the problem of reconfiguration of a satellite
constellation in a circular formation. In our scenario, a formation of equally
spaced spacecraft need to undergo an autonomous reconfiguration due to the
deorbiting of a satellite in the formation. The remaining spacecraft have to
reconfigure to form again an equidistant formation. To achieve this goal, we
consider two decentralized strategies that rely on different sets of
information about the neighboring spacecraft in the formation. In the fully
decentralized case, each controller knows only the current states of each
spacecraft, i.e. position and velocity, while in the second decentralized
strategy with with information sharing, the entire planned nominal trajectory
of each spacecraft is available to its neighbors. Our numerical simulation
results show that, by increasing the amount of information available to each
spacecraft, faster reconfiguration maneuvers with smaller fuel consumption can
be achieved.
