To determine a bus subscriber arrangement in an automation network, the following steps are carried out: outputting a data packet via a control bus subscriber on a data line, where each bus subscriber records a forward timestamp upon receiving the data packet through an input/output port on the forward path and a return timestamp upon receiving the data packet through another input/output port on the return path; correlating the recorded timestamps of each bus subscriber by forming a differential amount between the forward and return timestamps, where for the last bus subscriber, for which only a first timestamp is recorded, the second timestamp is set equal to the first timestamp; and sorting the differences from the largest to the smallest value in order to determine the set-up sequence of the bus subscribers, starting from the control bus subscriber as a set-up line of the bus subscribers.