How ground-based telescopes schedule their observations in response to competing science priorities and constraints, variations in the weather, and the visibility of a particular part of the sky can significantly impact their efficiency. In this paper we introduce the Feature-Based telescope scheduler that is an automated, proposal-free decision making algorithm that offers \textit{controllability} of the behavior, \textit{adjustability} of the mission, and quick \textit{recoverability} from interruptions for large ground-based telescopes. By framing this scheduler in the context of a coherent mathematical model the functionality and performance of the algorithm is simple to interpret and adapt to a broad range of astronomical applications. This paper presents a generic version of the Feature-Based scheduler, with minimal manual tailoring, to demonstrate its potential and flexibility as a foundation for large ground-based telescope schedulers which can later be adjusted for other instruments. In addition, a modified version of the Feature-Based scheduler for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is introduced and compared to previous LSST scheduler simulations.
@article{arxiv.1810.04815,
title = {A Framework for Telescope Schedulers: With Applications to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope},
author = {Elahesadat Naghib and Peter Yoachim and Robert J. Vanderbei and Andrew J. Connolly and R. Lynne Jones},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04815},
year = {2019}
}