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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
A number of characteristics are boosting the eagerness of extending Ethernet to also
cover factory-floor distributed real-time applications. Full-duplex links, non-blocking and
priority-based switching, bandwidth availability, just to mention a few, are characteristics
upon which that eagerness is building up. But, will Ethernet technologies really manage to
replace traditional Fieldbus networks? Ethernet technology, by itself, does not include
features above the lower layers of the OSI communication model. In the past few years, it is
particularly significant the considerable amount of work that has been devoted to the timing
analysis of Ethernet-based technologies. It happens, however, that the majority of those
works are restricted to the analysis of sub-sets of the overall computing and communication
system, thus without addressing timeliness at a holistic level.
To this end, we are addressing a few inter-linked research topics with the purpose of
setting a framework for the development of tools suitable to extract temporal properties of
Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Ethernet-based factory-floor distributed systems. This
framework is being applied to a specific COTS technology, Ethernet/IP. In this paper, we
reason about the modelling and simulation of Ethernet/IP-based systems, and on the use of
statistical analysis techniques to provide usable results. Discrete event simulation models of
a distributed system can be a powerful tool for the timeliness evaluation of the overall
system, but particular care must be taken with the results provided by traditional statistical
analysis techniques.