The VSAT shifter essentially takes care of every part of the detector. He attends the pit-meetings to report on the status of the detector. He is the on-call person during problems and makes the VSAT shifts by checking the detector online at least once a day. Apart from this he also takes care of the processing of the data offline, maintaining the disks and the system, doing backup of the data and checking the offline data quality.
Due to lack of manpower the VSAT detector only has one shifter for the whole year and in the future perhaps not even that. It is therefore necessary to automize these tasks as much as possible in order to make the life for the shifter a bit easier. It is also vital that this automation gives easy and clear output on what the VSAT shifter should do, in case it is not possible to find a person who takes care of it all during the whole year.
In order to be able to automize the VSAT shifter tasks, it is first necessary to have fixed guidelines on how everything should be done. This chapter is a proposal of such guidelines which has been implemented in the software package THOR. It only concerns the offline duties as the online duties are pretty hard to automize by computer(going to meetings, being on call etc.).