RTEthernet: Real-time communication for manufacturing cyberphysical systems

Cloud manufacturing yields insights of manufacturing services over cyberspace based on the integration of advanced manufacturing with cloud computing. However, the different communication standards between the different system levels are the main challenge for the integration without conflicting communication. Ethernet appears to be 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 standards to enable real-time processing for factory networks, termed real-time Ethernet (RTEthernet). In this paper, we introduce new architectures for master and controller stations. The objective is to have the maximum number of machines transmitting data in a data transmission window (coordinated cycle). The problem is called the maximum number of real-time data transmission (MNRDT) problem. The MNRDT is shown to be NP-hard. An approximation and three relevant solutions are proposed for addressing the reduction of MNRDT and the MNRDT problem. Simulation results are provided to show the performance of proposed solutions.