Automatic Network Configuration for Real-Time, Distributed Industrial Automation Systems

The current trend towards the Industrial Internet of Things raises new requirements regarding the connectivity of distributed automation systems. Time-sensitive Networking is a new IEEE standard fulfilling these requirements by providing determinism and real-time for convergent networks. The networks in this domain are currently configured manually, but the rising number of network nodes, more frequent reconfigurations and the combination of different scheduling mechanisms will make a manual network configuration infeasible. My proposed Ph.D. thesis strives to automate the network configuration for real-time, distributed industrial automation systems. This can be accomplished by deducing the relevant network requirements from extended domain-specific models (e.g., IEC 61499) and synthesizing network schedules according to the deduced information that can be transformed into constraints and solved by constraint-based solvers like Satisfiability Modulo Theorem solvers.