Abstract: The observation scheduling is an indispensable part of the telescope observation control system to realize autonomous observation. The 40-meter radio telescope of the Yunnan Observatories combines the requirements of long-term and short-term observation scheduling. In the current practice of short-term observation scheduling, it mainly relies on the observers to manually implement them based on experiences. This method is not only inefficient and time-consuming, but also causes the results to deviate significantly from the optimal observation plan, and the valuable observation time of the telescope cannot be fully utilized. In this paper, the mixed integer linear programming model is used to analyze the problem of the short-term observation target of the 40 m radio telescope. We define the constraints in the short-term observation target scheduling, adapt the minimization of total slew times as the objective function, and use mathematical optimization to solve the short-term observation target scheduling problem. The proposed method has also been tested on the 40 m radio telescope, which can better meet the requirements of current short-term observation target scheduling.