Dorado observation planning and scheduling simulations

Dorado is a proposed space mission for ultraviolet follow-up of gravitational wave events. This repository contains a simple target of opportunity observation planner for Dorado.

This project is free and open source, but it calls commercial software: it uses IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio ("CPLEX") for mathematical optimization. CPLEX is free for students, faculty, and staff at accredited educational institutions through the IBM Academic Initiative.

To get started with dorado-scheduling, see the quick start instructions in the manual.

Features

• Global: jointly and globally solves the problems of tiling (the set of telescope boresight orientations and roll angles) and the scheduling (which tile is observed at what time), rather than solving each sub-problem one at a time
• Optimal: generally solves all the way to optimality, rather than finding merely a "good enough" solution
• Fast: solve an entire orbit in about 5 minutes
• General: does not depend on heuristics of any kind
• Flexible: problem is formulated in the versatile framework of mixed integer programming

Dependencies

• Astropy
• Astroplan for calculating the field of regard
• HEALPix, cdshealpix, and astropy-healpix for observation footprints
• sgp4 for orbit propagation
• CPLEX (via [docplex] Python interface) for constrained optimization