Topological design of industrial Ethernet networks with a fast heuristic

The recent rapid development of industrial Ethernet requires addressing the topic of network design from a new perspective. The design of industrial Ethernet networks must typically consider real-time constraints and robustness against network failures. In this paper, the topology design of industrial Ethernet networks problem is firstly modelled considering the requirements of industrial applications. Considering the increasing scale of industrial Ethernet networks, computational complexity of network optimization schemes becomes a more and more important issue. A fast algorithm based on a heuristic extension of a genetic algorithm is presented and shown to provide an effective solution and lower computation complexity as compared to a pure genetic algorithm.