Interactive, Incremental Scheduling for Virtual Telescopes in Education

The Telescopes in Education (TIE) project, which began in 1992, provides remote access for students to control large observatory telescopes in real time. TIE began with a single telescope, and with manual evaluation and scheduling of student requests. With the sucess of TIE, 20 or more additional telescopes are expected to come on line. With proportionally more student requests, we anticipate that managing the requests and telescope resources will rapidly become too complex and time-consuming to handle manually. To respond to this problem, the Virtual Telescopes in Education (VTIE) project was begun last year. VTIE will provide networked capabilities for automated proposal preparation and evaluation, scheduling, and data archival. This paper describes the interactive scheduling capability that is under development for VTIE. Accepted observation requests will be incrementally and interactively scheduled by a constraint-based scheduler, and rescheduled as needed in response to dynamically changing weather and telescope conditions. The scheduling system incorporates a novel method for cost-sensitive constraint satisfaction, which will enable modeling of the costs of data gathering and user interaction during schedule repair.