Rubin ToO Alert Producer

This is an implementation of the Target of Opportunity Alert Producer (ToO Alert Producer), as described by TSTN-035: Handling Targets of Opportunity. It is intended to listen for alerts published via an external system (e.g. the HOPSKOTCH pub-sub service), apply filtering rules as outlined in Rubin ToO 2024: Envisioning the Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST Target of Opportunity program, and forward suitable descriptions of any passing alerts to the telescope scheduler via the EFD.

Not all alert types are yet implemented.

Interface

This tool is inded to work as a long-running service, typically inside a Kubernetes cluster. It can therefore be configured from a YAML configuration file which can be injected into its container via a Kubernetes ConfigMap. For testing and debugging it can also be run as a stand-alone script, using either a configuration file or command-line options. Input and output are handled using pluggable mechanisms, so that input can be from some set of topics on an Apache Kafka cluster, or a simple set of files, and output can be published to a Kafka topic (which may be on another cluster than the input topics), routed indirectly to a Kafka cluster via an instance of the Confluent Kafka REST Proxy, or written (in a reduced form) to standrd output. Each input topic should be mapped in the configuration to an alert filter type.

An example configuration file might look like:

# Ignore alerts marked by the sender(s) as tests
allow-tests: false

# Listen for alerts from two Kafka topics, topic1 and topic2
input-type: "kafka"
input-options:
  url: "kafka://127.0.0.1:9092/topic1,topic2"

# Treat the alerts from both topics as gravitational wave alerts in the LVK format
filters:
  topic1: lvk_gw
  topic2: lvk_gw

# Write passing alerts to topic3 of some Kafka broker via a REST proxy
output-type: "confluent_rest"
output-options:
  url: "http://localhost:8082/topics/topic3"

Event Types

The following set of labels is used in the output records to identify the various cases outlined in the recommednation paper:

| too_types_to_follow in scheduler 	| Corresponding strategy from ToO 2024 recommendation 	|
|----------------------------------	|-----------------------------------------------------	|
| GW_case_A                        	| -                                                   	|
| GW_case_B                        	| GW gold                                             	|
| GW_case_C                        	| unidentified gold                                   	|
| GW_case_D                        	| GW silver                                           	|
| GW_case_E                        	| Unidentified silver                                 	|
| BBH_case_A                       	| BBH_dark_near                                       	|
| BBH_case_B                       	| BBH_dark_far                                        	|
| BBH_case_C                       	| BBH_bright                                          	|
| lensed_BNS_case_A                	| 900 deg skymap                                      	|
| lensed_BNS_case_B                	| 15 deg skymap                                       	|
| neutrino and neutrino_u          	| Neutrino                                            	|
| SSO_night                        	| Small PHA                                           	|
| SSO_twilight                     	| Small PHA                                           	|
| GW_case_large                    	| Large GW skymaps                                    	|
| Lensed_GRB                       	| Lensed GRB                                          	|
| SN_Galactic                      	| Galactic supernova                                  	|