Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

Masters of Science (Research)

Department

Computing

First Advisor

Dr. Jeanne Stynes

Second Advisor

Dr. Reinhold Kröger

Abstract

Engineers usually use computer aided methods to ease the increasingly complex planning task of automation plants. One such computer aided method for automated planning of Industrial Ethernet networks under given network QoS requirements is presented in this thesis. The method is based on partitioning the given set of network nodes according to specified communication relationships between the nodes, thereby creating subsets of nodes which are joined using given networking algorithms. Several networking algorithms may be applicable for each subset of nodes and any complete solution is a combination of several partial solutions, one for each subset of nodes. Enumeration through all possible complete solutions is realized by a best-first search over all combinations of evaluated partial solutions. An implementation using the Industrial Ethernet protocol PROFINET RT is presented: a prototype for a network planning tool is developed based on the Network Design Framework (NDF). The application allowed a successful evaluation of the network planning method and the NDF as a framework for network planning tools. A parallel variant of the best-first search is also explored to provide acceptable response times for the network planning tool. This variant works on one complete solution while considering multiple partial solutions in parallel based on the subsets of nodes from the partitioning process, and provides an alternative to the approach of Kumar et al, who proposed working on multiple complete solutions for the given problem in parallel.

Access Level

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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