Cost-efficient scheduling of FAST observations

• DOI: 10.1007/s10686-018-9577-2
• Publication Date: 2018-02-15T19:59:26Z
• Authors: Qi Luo; Laiping Zhao; Ce Yu; Jian Xiao; Jizhou Sun; Ming Zhu; Yi Zhong
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; 0102 computer and information sciences; 01 natural sciences

A cost-efficient schedule for the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) requires to maximize the number of observable proposals and the overall scientific priority, and minimize the overall slew-cost generated by telescope shifting, while taking into account the constraints including the astronomical objects visibility, user-defined observable times, avoiding Radio Frequency Interference (RFI). In this contribution, first we solve the problem of maximizing the number of observable proposals and scientific priority by modeling it as a Minimum Cost Maximum Flow (MCMF) problem. The optimal schedule can be found by any MCMF solution algorithm. Then, for minimizing the slew-cost of the generated schedule, we devise a maximally-matchable edges detection-based method to reduce the problem size, and propose a backtracking algorithm to find the perfect matching with minimum slew-cost. Experiments on a real dataset from NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) show that, the proposed scheduler can increase the usage of available times with high scientific priority and reduce the slew-cost significantly in a very short time.