Linear time, possibly disjoint path search approach for ethernet based industrial automation networks

One of the most important requirements for the industrial networks, apart from the real-time capability, is the reliability. There are several methods that can be used to increase the communication reliability. One of them is data duplication, which is afterwards transmitted using two different (disjoint) paths. Since, such path search for time triggered Ethernet based systems is typically done during engineering, it is important to keep the time needed for that as short as possible. Especially, if some topology changes are foreseen causing system re-engineering. Therefore in this paper an algorithm is proposed that has linear time complexity and is able to find two possibly disjoint paths for an arbitrary network topology in a short time.