Service Mode Observing Tools at ESO's VLT

G Giannone, A M Chavan, D Silva, ESO; A P Krueger, G E Miller, STScI

A significant fraction of VLT observing time is reserved for
"Service Mode" (SM) operations.  Service Mode investigators create
Observation Blocks (OBs) specifying target information and describing
the technical setup of the telescope, instrument, and detector.  The
Paranal Science Operations Team (SciOps) will later select and execute
these OBs, trying to match the current weather conditions with the
OBs' constraints. The operations team needs to select OBs for
execution browsing the OB Repository with different search conditions
and constraints; a key feature is the ability to identify which OBs
can be executed under the current weather conditions and/or telescope
settings.

The Operational Toolkit (OT) and the Short Term Scheduler (STS) are a
pair of integrated tools developed to support the SciOps Team during
SM observing nights. The OT allows the SciOps Team to browse the OB
repository and build queues (Medium-Terms schedules) of OBs, based on
target visibility and user defined scheduling constraints.  The STS is
a decision support system used to create Short-Term timelines by
processing queues of OBs.  The tool helps choosing which OB
should be executed at any time in order to maximize telescope
utilization and respect the user defined observing constraints.