The Research of Load Balance Improvement in Industrial Networks

The network load balance problem in an industrial network is investigated and this problem is equivalent to an optimization problem: the network partition should reduce the inter-network communication time and simultaneously minimize the communication time difference over the sub-networks for the sake of real-time and reliability performance. Simultaneously the switching capability must be respected when partitioning devices into sub-networks, which sets the constraints of the network optimization problem. The genetic algorithm strategy is proposed to find near-optimal solution for the network partition problem. Then a simulation research is carried out to investigate the capability of the proposed genetic algorithm, and the simulation result shows significant improvement of the network performance after the network optimization.