Control software and scheduling of the Liverpool Robotic Telescope

The Liverpool Telescope will be a fully robotic 2m telescope situated in La Palma and managed from Liverpool John Moores University. The data flows between the robotic components of the telescope are discussed and the functionality of those components described. We pay particular attention to the design of the telescope scheduler. Using simulations we show that a relatively simple dispatch scheduler may be tuned to produce a schedule that has acceptable trade-offs between conflicting scheduling criteria.