Gregory R.S. Ilg & R. J. Brown2
The Timed Event Network Scheduler (TENS) is a scheduler with its own high level language well suited to real-time process control and industrial automation applications. In the TENS language, which is an extension of Forth, dependencies among different events are specified. When any action or time duration in the system is altered, no other modifications are necessary to maintain and preserve these dependencies. At compilation time, the critical path through the network and its path length measured in units of time are displayed. This allows the designer to easily see which processes need to be streamlined in order to increase system throughput. The TENS paradigm was inspired by the critical path method (CPM) scheduling techniques used to manage large projects.