This paper addresses the problem of formation reconfiguration for deputy
spacecraft flying in a spatial circular formation around a chief spacecraft. To
improve the real-time applicability of formation control under onboard
computational limitations, a reconfiguration method is proposed by integrating
Tschauner–Hempel (T-H) relative dynamics, Event-Triggered Model Predictive
Control (ET-MPC), and a Move Blocking strategy, while explicitly considering
collision-avoidance constraints. Based on the T-H relative dynamic model, an MPC
framework is established to generate control inputs for the reconfiguration
process. To reduce the computational burden of conventional MPC, an
event-triggering mechanism is introduced so that the optimization problem is
solved only when necessary, rather than at every sampling instant. Meanwhile, a
Move Blocking strategy is employed to reduce the number of online decision
variables by constraining successive control moves over predefined intervals. In
addition, to simultaneously address inter-spacecraft collision avoidance and
limited-thrust constraints, an optimization model with binary variables is
formulated. To evaluate the proposed approach, four simulation cases, namely
MPC, ET-MPC, MB-MPC, and MBET-MPC, are conducted under the same reconfiguration
scenario. Simulation results show that all four methods can successfully
accomplish the formation reconfiguration task while satisfying the minimum
safe-distance requirement. Moreover, the methods incorporating Move Blocking
reduce the computation time required for solving each individual optimization
problem, while the event-triggered schemes significantly reduce the number of
optimization updates compared with the corresponding time-triggered methods,
thereby further lowering the overall computational cost. The results demonstrate
that the proposed method provides an effective and feasible solution for
real-time formation reconfiguration and control on resource-constrained
spacecraft platforms.