The Dos and Don'ts of Industrial Network Simulation: A Field Report

Advances in industrial control lead to increasing incorporation of intercommunication technologies and embedded devices into the production environment. In addition to that, the rising complexity of automation tasks creates demand for extensive solutions. Standardised protocols and commercial off the shelf devices aid in providing these solutions. Still, setting up industrial communication networks is a tedious and high effort task. This justifies the need for simulation environments in the industrial context, as they provide cost-, resource- and time-efficient evaluation of solution approaches. In this work, industrial use cases are identified and the according requirements are derived. Furthermore, available simulation and emulation tools are analysed. They are mapped onto the requirements of industrial applications, so that an expressive assignment of solutions to application domains is given.