Modeling offset adaptations for latency minimization in cascaded communication networks for factory automation

In the context of connected industries mobility and flexibility are becoming increasingly important. Accordingly, the use of cascaded communication networks consisting of wired and wireless subnetworks is of interest to support these features. However, by cascading different subnetworks, additional occurring latencies negatively influence the real-time behavior of the overall communication. These latencies are dependent on the parameterization of individual subnetworks and their adaptation onto each other. Therefore, within this paper, we introduce a model to analyze the overall timing behavior of arbitrary cascaded networks for factory automation. Based on this model, we show both an analytical and a heuristic method to find an optimized parameter set for the individual subnetworks of a cascaded network in order to reduce the overall latency. This will improve the usability of cascaded networks in the area of factory automation.