Operations for non-disruptive modification of real-time network schedules

New production architectures and the Time Sensitive Networking extensions of the Ethernet standard enable larger real-time networks with more participants than before. Due to the guaranteed response times of real-time applications, there are limitations in rescheduling. This paper presents operations which allow modification of the schedule of a time-division multiple access (TDMA) real-time network without affecting its proper functionality. For this purpose, both the communication and the involved real-time applications are considered. This allows the active schedule to be modified during the rescheduling. Therefore, failed rescheduling due to fragmentation is less likely.