This paper identifies that existing industrial automation standards, such as IEC/IEEE 60802 and IEEE 802.1Q, often have inconsistent definitions of traffic types. In the context of utilizing time-sensitive networking (TSN) standards for future automation systems, clear and consistent traffic characteristics and use cases should be defined to benefit from TSN features. Besides that, to facilitate the integration of TSN into the automation systems, the current standards provide a recommendation for mapping the automation traffic to the TSN traffic classes. In this paper, we propose an alternative mapping methodology for automation traffic to TSN traffic classes after presenting the existing automation traffic and their characteristics. Finally, through a case study, we show the potential of the new mapping methodology compared to the standard mapping strategy.

© 2025 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, including reprinting/republishing for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.This is the author’s accepted version of the article:K. Ekrad, I. A. Vadillo, B. Johansson, S. Mubeen and M. Ashjae, “A Methodology to Map Industrial Automation Traffic to TSN Traffic Classes,,” in Proc. 2025 IEEE 30th Int. Conf. on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA), 2025. DOI: 10.1109/ETFA65518.2025.11205571