Scheduler Agenda
- Wednesday Morning
- 2nd day : discussions on the following four questions based on external people's past experiences
- We will turn the questions into a slide per question
- Discussion about scheduling algorithms
- Describe the greedy algorithm in one slide
- What other optimization approaches are available (does this include 'weather-modified/look-ahead-modified marching army'?)
- Are greedy approaches sub optimal (when should we be looking beyond greedy)
- How much human tweaking is used (are their automated schedulers)
- Describe our thoughts for lookahead in one slide
- What other approaches are possible and how do we make it deterministic
- How far in advance can we predict the LSST position
- Experiences in short term (tactical) and long term (strategic) scheduling
- One scheduler model or a hierarchy
- Update strategic model in the day (do we care on timescales less than a lunation)
- How do we define which heuristics are good (are these heuristics=metrics for tracking progress?)
- trial and error, best practices
- How do we preserve temporal uniformity
- What do we mean by this (one slide) and why we care
- How do we represent spatially varying sky (e.g. twilight, cloud etc) and not just search for sucker holes
- Why are filter changes important (slide on number of changes per hour, one change in 20 mins and its impact)
- how can we minimize the filter changes
- Grammar (do we need a better grammar to describe proposals?)
- Explain the difference between what we schedule and what other telescopes schedule
- What are the types of time constraints we have in the science proposals (or engineering) - one slide
- are we missing any particular science case(s) and how rich is our grammar
- How should we describe the time dependent events or proposals - one slide
- Can we change the action if we fail to meet one of the objectives with an observation
- Input telemetry
- Slide on what telemetry info we have (including the cloud camera and observatory model). Slide from the overview of opsim
- What are we missing - do we need DM feedback or can we
- Have people successfully employed predictive models (e.g. predict the weather 3 hrs from now)
- Slide on what models we plan to have in place (e.g. sky and twilight model)
- Do other observatories use this real time information?
- How do they represent the data
- How might we visualize the outputs and determine if something is going wrong
- Development of metrics
- We need to take care that we focus less on the sociology and more on the mathematics of optimization and metrics
- What are our current metrics designed to address (types of science cases) - one slide
- How do we turn a metric into a benefit function to trade-off with the cost function?
- How do we fold a metric back into a schedule and then into a proposal
- We have multiple groups working with many different metrics
- How do we manage different groups (are metrics for other systems all in-house)
- Are there mechanisms to combine metrics to reduce the number of distinct metrics or is this all ad hoc
- Probably naive to think we will have a single cost function but many cost functions that we will optimize
- Optimization of a single cost function: Is that realistic or not?
- how do we account for data that is good for some proposals and bad for others
- Room under Iain - power strips
- Record the talks and discussions