Research on Transportation System Planning for Lunar Colonization Based on Pareto Optimization and Monte Carlo Simulation

Abstract

Amid Earth’s worsening ecological pressure and resource conflicts, the Moon is humanity’s top choice for the first extraterrestrial colony. The 2050-launched 100,000-person lunar colony requires transporting 100 million tons of construction materials and securing long-term stable water supply. This paper builds a multi-model collaborative framework to evaluate lunar transportation schemes from cost, time, reliability and environmental impact perspectives. A weighted bi-objective optimization model for minimizing cost and time is constructed, and Pareto frontier analysis yields an optimal hybrid transportation ratio with a total cost of $1.08×10¹² and a 148.98-year duration. Monte Carlo simulation quantifies four failure scenarios’ impacts: rocket failures barely affect transportation time, while elevator and extreme failures cause severe delays and performance decline, requiring a 30-year buffer and a $221.4 billion contingency budget. Additionally, a regression forecasting-MOEA/D integrated framework estimates the colony’s annual water demand at 270,000 tons, verifying that elevator-dominated transportation is more economically efficient and operationally reliable for long-term lunar water supply.