AN EXTENSIBLE FRAMEWORK FOR OBSERVATORY SYSTEM BASED ON DOCKER CLOUD

Remote observatory is playing more and more important role in scientific research, astronomy education and citizen science. With many years' development, remote observatory whether hardware or software has made great progress. It supports single telescope well and has been very mature. For high utility rate of an observatory, more and more observatories has began to run multiple telescopes to provide more observation services. But it also takes some challenges, for example how to manage telescopes, how to manage lots of observers, how to update driver or application quickly and how to realize coordination and cooperation between different telescopes. After taking into full consideration of the problems, we propose an extensible framework for observatory system based on Docker cloud. It not only could solve that challenges from multi telescopes, but also could make software application to support more hardware platform easily.

Optimization in Handling Tasks in Monorail Transportation System at Busan Port

This paper presents an optimal solution for handling tasks at Busan Container Port in South Korea. Currently, there is a monorail transportation system being constructed and supposed to be ready in use in 2045. It is a project in association with Korean Government that aims to increase the utility rate at Busan Port – one of the biggest container port in the world. At the moment, the main transport mean at Busan Port is truck – whose speed is about 40-50 km/h, however this traditional method leads to a low productivity and traffic congestions on the road. An innovation is to build a monorail system that could operates at high speed (about 80-90 km/h) along the entire port to transfer standardized containers. This new transportation system is expected to strongly reduce the delay in transporting as well as increase the overall efficiency for the system. In new system, there are transport vehicles called shuttles that would move on the rail in only one direction, and to turn back in the opposite way, there are some special stations called change stations that would direct the shuttles into the other lanes – which is similar to the lane driver systems on the railway. Containers at each inner terminal in Busan Port will be grabbed onto the shuttles by special equipments called loaders – a kind of giant automated manipulator that would load or unload whenever a shuttle requires. To optimize the operation, we introduce a heuristic algorithm called Greedy Algorithm for scheduling tasks and assigning tasks – two major actions in a cycle work that significantly affects to the system’s performance. First, the containers at each loader position will be sorted in a proper sequence, and then the sorted schedule will be assigned to proper shuttles in order to lower the total working time and delay time as much as possible. The overall performance is simulated by MATLAB software, including the result charts showing the main criteria points, in order to highlight the advantage of new transportation system.