Scheduling of PROFINET IRT communication in redundant network topologies

Abstract

Scheduling of time triggered communication systems belongs to the well known hard mathematical optimization problems. This paper tackles the communication scheduling problem in redundant network topologies, where the real-time process data has to be duplicated and sent on two different paths to its destination. This paper proposes an algorithm that is able to find a feasible schedule in a short time, while keeping the makespan of the schedule in average 10% shorter than the makespan of the schedule produced by a commercial tool, which is the current benchmark.