http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.00013
Electromagnetic follow-up of gravitational wave detections is very resource intensive, taking up hours of limited observation time on dozens of telescopes. Creating more efficient schedules for follow-up will lead to a commensurate increase in counterpart location efficiency without using more telescope time. Widely used in operations research and telescope scheduling, mixed integer linear programming (MILP) is a strong candidate to produce these higher-efficiency schedules, as it can make use of powerful commercial solvers that quickly and efficiently find globally optimal solutions to provided problems. We detail a new target of opportunity scheduling algorithm designed with Zwicky Transient Facility in mind that uses mixed integer linear programming. We compare its performance to \texttt{gwemopt}, the tuned heuristic scheduler used by the Zwicky Transient Facility and other facilities during the third LIGO-Virgo gravitational wave observing run. This new algorithm uses variable-length observing blocks to enforce cadence requirements and ensure field observability, along with having a secondary optimization step to minimize slew time. Our algorithm shows improvement over \texttt{gwemopt} in successfully scheduling observations for a simulated binary neutron star merger data set consistent with LIGO-Virgo’s third observing run. We demonstrate the ability to achieve better efficiencies with this straightforward algorithm, highlighting the potential of mixed integer target of opportunity schedulers for future multimessenger follow-up surveys.
B. Parazin, M. Coughlin, L. Singer, et. al.
Wed, 2 Mar 22
42/54
Comments: 10 pages, 5 figures
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