Design and evaluation of real-time communication for FieldBus based manufacturing systems

A strategy for handling real-time communications under the FieldBus protocol, which provides end-to-end delivery delay guarantees for time-critical messages, is proposed. This strategy provides a fast local mechanism for establishing intraworkcell real-time connections, while supporting global interworkcell real-time connections. The proposed strategy is fully compatible with the current draft proposal of the FieldBus protocol and also provides flexibility for the choice of scheduling algorithms and adaptability for different traffic loads. Numerical examples are given based on a typical manufacturing network.<>