Automated network layout for the industrial communication engineering system NetGen:X

Due to the rapid development and the variety of available bus systems, the planning of communication systems is becoming increasingly complex. In future the prevalent star structure of conventional wiring will be more and more replaced by other types of topologies. Motivated by the advantages of scalable and flexible digital bus systems, this paper describes a systematic and innovative approach to support several tedious industrial communication engineering steps within a technology independent decision support system. Towards that end several well known graph-theoretical routing algorithms were adapted to meet the requirements of industrial communication network layouts. This article describes the algorithms and the domain specific adaptations and demonstrates the feasibility of the approach with the successful application to an industrial-relevant use case.