A productivity-oriented methodology for local area network design in industrial environments

  • Authors:

  • Rafael Estepa;Antonio Estepa;Thiago Cupertino

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Telematics Engineering, University of Sevilla, C/ Camino de los Descubrimientos s/n, 41092 Sevilla, Spain;Department of Telematics Engineering, University of Sevilla, C/ Camino de los Descubrimientos s/n, 41092 Sevilla, Spain;Department of Telematics Engineering, University of Sevilla, C/ Camino de los Descubrimientos s/n, 41092 Sevilla, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Industrial plants use conventional local area networks (LANs) to access a growing number of client/server (C/S) applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) which have a direct impact on organization's productivity. These LANs are typically extended throughout the plant which makes them exposed to occasional accidents such as fiber breakages or power failures. Reliable network design (RND) problems address the design of minimum-cost topologies resilient to link failures up to a certain degree. However, RND problems fail to capture some parameters of practical importance for organizations such as productivity losses due to network outages, the time period for which the network design is expected to be operating, or the fact that not all nodes are equally important for productivity. We propose a new approach to LAN topological design named Productivity-aware reliable network design (PA-RND) that takes into account the productivity associated to each node of the network, minimizing not only the CAPEX but also the expected cost attributable to network downtimes over a certain period of network operation. Results show that our PA-RND problem optimizes the LAN topological design obtaining better results than current network design problems such as reliability constrained network design (RCND), minimum spanning tree (MST) or minimum cost ring (MCR).