The Zwicky Transient Facility: Surveys and Scheduler

Eric C. Bellm, Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, Tom Barlow, Ulrich Feindt, Matthew J. Graham +9 more
5/6/2019
astro-ph.IM

Official code: ZwickyTransientFacility/ztf_sim (12 stars, BSD-3-Clause, last commit 2026-08-27).

Abstract

We present a novel algorithm for scheduling the observations of time-domain imaging surveys. Our Integer Linear Programming approach optimizes an observing plan for an entire night by assigning targets to temporal blocks, enabling strict control of the number of exposures obtained per field and minimizing filter changes. A subsequent optimization step minimizes slew times between each observation. Our optimization metric self-consistently weights contributions from time-varying airmass, seeing, and sky brightness to maximize the transient discovery rate. We describe the implementation of this algorithm on the surveys of the Zwicky Transient Facility and present its on-sky performance.

View on arXivView PDF

Code Implementations(1)

ZwickyTransientFacility/ztf_simOfficial100%
BSD-3-Clause

:telescope: Zwicky Transient Facility survey scheduler

129Python, Jupyter NotebookAug 30, 20151 months agoBSD-3-Clause

Similar Papers

Three multi-objective memtic algorithms for observation scheduling problem of active-imaging AEOS

80% match2022

Multi-strip observation scheduling problem for ac-tive-imaging agile earth observation satellites

78% match2022

A Constraint Programming Model for the Super-Agile Earth Observation Satellite Imaging Scheduling Problem

76% match2026

DynST: Dynamic Sparse Training for Resource-Constrained Spatio-Temporal Forecasting

76% match2024

Towards Realistic Earth-Observation Constellation Scheduling: Benchmark and Methodology

75% match1 repo362025

An Automated Tip-and-Cue Framework for Optimized Satellite Tasking and Visual Intelligence

75% match2025

Cite this paper

@article{bellm2019zwicky,
  title  = {The Zwicky Transient Facility: Surveys and Scheduler},
  author = {Eric C. Bellm and Shrinivas R. Kulkarni and Tom Barlow and Ulrich Feindt and Matthew J. Graham and Ariel Goobar and Thomas Kupfer and Chow-Choong Ngeow and Peter Nugent and Eran Ofek and Thomas A. Prince and Reed Riddle and Richard Walters and Quan-Zhi Ye},
  year   = {2019},
  eprint = {1905.02209},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02209}
}

Add a badge to your README

Shows whether official code is linked for this paper.

Code of Paper badge
[![Code of Paper](https://codeofpaper.com/badge/1905.02209.svg)](https://codeofpaper.com/paper/1905.02209)

Discussion