Collision Schedules and Bunch Filling Schemes in the LHC

The collision schedule is a description of when and where bunches collide. The LHC's collision schedule depends on the structure of the bunch trains which, in turn, varies with the injection scheme. A general analysis of the problem, including the differences of arc length between inner and outer arcs of the rings and the positions of the interaction points (including the displacement of IP8) yields the collision schedule for any choice of bunch trains. This provides the first steps a comparison between the nominal filling scheme and two recently proposed alternatives.