Astronomical observation tasks short-term scheduling using PDDS algorithm

TL;DR

This paper presents a PDDS algorithm-based method for short-term online scheduling of astronomical observation tasks to improve telescope efficiency by optimizing task allocation based on environmental conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of the PDDS algorithm for real-time scheduling of astronomical observations, integrated into an open-source C++ library for a specific telescope.

Findings

Algorithm performance aspects are discussed.

The method aims to increase observational efficiency.

The approach is implemented in an open-source library.

Abstract

A concept of the ground-based optical astronomical observations efficiency is considered in this paper. We believe that a telescope efficiency can be increased by properly allocating observation tasks with respect to the current environment state and probability to obtain the data with required properties under the current conditions. An online observations scheduling is assumed to be essential part for raising the efficiency. The short-term online scheduling is treated as the discrete optimisation problems which are stated using several abstraction levels. The optimisation problems are solved using a parallel depth-bounded discrepancy search (PDDS) algorithm [13]. Some aspects of the algorithm performance are discussed. The presented algorithm is a core of open-source chelyabinsk C++ library which is supposed to be used at 2.5 m telescope of Sternberg Astronomical Institude of Lomonosov Moscow State University.