Genetic algorithms for industrial Ethernet network design

The Ethernet network is increasingly used for the industrial communications which are strongly time-constrained This kind of network is intrinsically non deterministic and does not enable to guarantee the communication end-to-end delays to be bounded. Nevertheless, from the observed traffic between the industrial devices, some network topologies improving the availability and the temporal performances can be designed This paper describes the use of a Genetic Algorithm approach for the optimisation and the design of industrial control networks. We propose to solve the combinatorial problem which consists in finding the best distribution of the industrial devices on a switched Ethernet architecture with GA techniques, so that the required Quality of Service is provided.