A field device in an industrial environment comprises a clock that is synchronized with a clock of at least one other field device. The method comprises determining a total number of desired digraph links in the network of nodes wherein a digraph link is a directional link specifying routing information at each node in the network between said node and a second node, and wherein the network of nodes includes a plurality of nodes each with a plurality of digraph links. The configuration data entered by the operator specifies the processors, IO, and memory allocated to each logical partition defined for the system. from a set of attributes to form an annotated sample set.