  How ground-based telescopes schedule their observations in response to
competing science priorities and constraints, variations in the weather, and
the visibility of a particular part of the sky can significantly impact their
efficiency. In this paper we introduce the Feature-Based telescope scheduler
that is an automated, proposal-free decision making algorithm that offers
\textit{controllability} of the behavior, \textit{adjustability} of the
mission, and quick \textit{recoverability} from interruptions for large
ground-based telescopes. By framing this scheduler in the context of a coherent
mathematical model the functionality and performance of the algorithm is simple
to interpret and adapt to a broad range of astronomical applications. This
paper presents a generic version of the Feature-Based scheduler, with minimal
manual tailoring, to demonstrate its potential and flexibility as a foundation
for large ground-based telescope schedulers which can later be adjusted for
other instruments. In addition, a modified version of the Feature-Based
scheduler for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is introduced and
compared to previous LSST scheduler simulations.
