Increasing flexibility of Time Triggered Ethernet based systems by optimal greedy scheduling approach

Many aspects have to be considered while achieving flexibility of production systems. One of them is flexible communication system that on one hand fulfils requirements of a particular industrial application and on the other hand allows integration of new network components optimally in a seamless way. In this paper, an approach to increase, rather static, Time Triggered Ethernet based systems is proposed. It is based on a greedy scheduling approach that can be implemented directly in a processing limited hardware such as IO Controller. This, together with the discovery and auto configuration mechanism proposed in [1] allows to shift the engineering process typically performed offline using engineering tool to the field level. Furthermore, it has been proven that the proposed scheduling approach is not only simple but also powerful. It is able to calculate an optimal schedule for any kind of tree graph and the complexity of the algorithm is defined by the complexity of the used sorting algorithm.