Knowledge based tools for Hubble Space Telescope planning and scheduling: Constraints and strategies
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) presents an especially challenging scheduling problem since a year's observing program encompasses tens of thousands of exposures facing numerous coupled constraints. Recent progress in the development of planning and scheduling tools is discussed which augment the existing HST ground system. General methods for representing activities, constraints, and constraint satisfaction, and time segmentation were implemented in a scheduling testbed. The testbed permits planners to evaluate optimal scheduling time intervals, calculate resource usage, and to generate long and medium range plans. Graphical displays of activities, constraints, and plans are an important feature of the system. High-level scheduling strategies using rule based and neural net approaches were implemented.