SMT-based synthesis of TTEthernet schedules: A performance study

Time-triggered networks, like TTEthernet, require adoption of a predefined schedule to guarantee low communication latency and minimal jitter. The synthesis of such schedules is a problem known to be NP-complete. In the past, specialized solvers have been used for synthesizing time-triggered schedules, but more recently general-purpose tools like Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers have reported synthesis of large network schedules in reasonable time for industrial purposes. An interesting characteristic of any general-purpose tool is that its configuration parameters can be tuned in order to fit specific problems and achieve increased performance. This paper presents a study identifying and assessing which SMT solver parameters have the highest impact on the performance when synthesizing schedules for time-triggered networks. The results show that with appropriate values of certain parameters, the time can be reduced significantly, up to 75% in the best cases compared to previous work.