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M4OPT is an open-source toolkit for multi-facility scheduling of astrophysicsobserving campaigns. It focuses on extremely rapid follow-up of gravitationalwave (GW) and neutrino events with heterogeneous networks of space andground-based observatories.

M4OPT uses the versatile mathematical framework ofmixed integerprogramming to model and solve complex observation scheduling problems.Although M4OPT is open source, for the largest problems it can leverage twoindustrial-strength commercial MIP solvers:CPLEX orGurobi. Bothsolvers are available for free for academic users.

M4OPT is designed from theAstropy affiliated package template, and ismeant to follow those standards, including interoperability with theAstropy ecosystem. It also complies withNASA Procedural Requirements(NPR) 7150 forClass C software and is suitable for non-safety-criticalground software applications forClass D NASA payloads.

This project is Copyright (c) M4OPT Developers and licensed underthe terms of the BSD 3-Clause license. This package is based upontheAstropy package templatewhich is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license. See the licenses folder formore information.

We love contributions! m4opt is open source,built on open source, and we'd love to have you hang out in our community.

Imposter syndrome disclaimer: We want your help. No, really.

There may be a little voice inside your head that is telling you that you're notready to be an open source contributor; that your skills aren't nearly goodenough to contribute. What could you possibly offer a project like this one?

We assure you - the little voice in your head is wrong. If you can write code atall, you can contribute code to open source. Contributing to open sourceprojects is a fantastic way to advance one's coding skills. Writing perfect codeisn't the measure of a good developer (that would disqualify all of us!); it'strying to create something, making mistakes, and learning from thosemistakes. That's how we all improve, and we are happy to help others learn.

Being an open source contributor doesn't just mean writing code, either. You canhelp out by writing documentation, tests, or even giving feedback about theproject (and yes - that includes giving feedback about the contributionprocess). Some of these contributions may be the most valuable to the project asa whole, because you're coming to the project with fresh eyes, so you can seethe errors and assumptions that seasoned contributors have glossed over.

Note: This disclaimer was originally written byAdrienne Lowe for aPyCon talk, and was adapted bym4opt based on its use in the README file for theMetPy project.