Effective and fast approach to schedule communication in PROFINET IRT networks

Today's market demands products with a high variety of configurations from the manufacturers. This causes the necessity of production line reconfiguration, allowing to add necessary equipment. Since, in some cases the whole communication has to be planned in advance, the communication planning needs to be performed again, whenever a network structure has been changed. In this paper a simple and fast approach of communication planning for the PROFINET IRT protocol is proposed. The proposed approach is able to calculate communication schedule for a 500 network devices in a time less than 0.2s. This is a significant step in direction of flexible PROFINET IRT systems.