Automated Scheduling of Doppler Exoplanet Observations at Keck Observatory

Abstract

Precise Doppler studies of extrasolar planets require fine-grained control of observational cadence, i.e. the timing of and spacing between observations. We present a novel framework for scheduling a set of Doppler campaigns with different cadence requirements at the W. M. Keck Observatory (WMKO). For a set of observing programs and allocated nights on an instrument, our software optimizes the timing and ordering of ~1000 observations within a given observing semester. We achieve a near-optimal solution in real-time using a hierarchical Integer Linear Programming (ILP) framework. Our scheduling formulation optimizes over the roughly 10^3000 possible orderings. A top level optimization finds the most regular sequence of allocated nights by which to observe each host star in the request catalog based on a frequency specified in the request. A second optimization scheme minimizes the slews and downtime of the instrument. We have assessed our algorithms performance with simulated data and with the real suite of Doppler observations of the California Planet Search in 2023.