Real-time communication for manufacturing cyber-physical systems

The cloud manufacturing yields insights of manufacturing services over cyber space based on integration of advanced manufacturing with cloud computing. However, the different communication standards between the different system levels are main challenges for the integration of them without a conflicting communication. Ethernet appears as the best solution to support all levels for industrial manufacturing systems. Since the synchronous integration is fulfilled, the prerequisite for deciding the overall performance of systems is adaptable real-time communication. This motivates us to study the problem of designing a new real-time communication based on Ethernet standard to enable real-time processing for factory networks, termed Real-Time Ethernet (RTEthernet). The objective is to schedule maximum number of machines transmitting data through a controller in a data transmission window (Coordinated Cycle) as well as guarantee the real-time communication. The problem is called the Maximum Number of Real-time Data Transmission (MNRDT) problem. Two relevant solutions are proposed for addressing the MNRDT problem. Simulation results are provided to show the performance of proposed solutions.