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Education in the field of distributed process control and intelligent actuation and measurement (IAM) systems can be greatly enhanced through the use of tools that simulate the behavior of real systems, thus allowing students to test and compare different configurations. In this paper, we present an educational virtual laboratory, called the IAM-Pilot Virtual Laboratory (IPVL), which simulates a physical process consisting of a closed circuit of treated water implementing four regulation loops for pressure, level, flow, and temperature, respectively. This tool is the virtual implementation of a real research laboratory (IAM-Pilot), which was developed a few years ago in the framework of several projects funded by the European Commission, in order to test concepts regarding distributed systems, technologies, and components. The tool allows students to set several different system configurations, both in the control and communication parts, and then assess the resulting behavior. They can also install on the plant different virtual devices, with different features, and monitor their effect on the system. The tool produces graphs that allow students to evaluate the performance offered by the control system. This paper describes the architecture and implementation of the IPVL and reports on its usage in the context of the distributed process control network course at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Catania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote laboratories are laboratories where the hardware devices are accessible through the Internet 24 h a day for running experiments on physical processes. These laboratories are commonly used as complementary tools in engineering education, allowing students to integrate theoretical notions with practical experiments without the necessity of being physically present inside a laboratory. The increased availability of experiments in a remote laboratory is certainly an advantage for students, but it implies an increase of the probability of hardware and software failures. Thus, maintaining physical processes in a remote laboratory may become a heavy task for laboratory administrators. Remote lab- oratory inefficiency due to hardware and software maintenance can be certainly reduced if the time that is required for software reinstallation and/or upgrade is kept as short as possible. In this paper, a technique based on the use of a bootable (live) device on the server side of a remote laboratory is reported. This solution, which, in principle, can be used in almost any remote laboratory, allows an administrator to greatly reduce the time that is needed to fix a hardware/software failure, as well as to add a new process to the laboratory in a faster way. Moreover, the use of such a tool will also increase the reliability of the entire laboratory. The application of the proposed method to the "Automatic Control Telelab," which is a remote laboratory that was developed at the University of Siena, is also described in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the current evolution of the telelaboratory facilities at the University of Pisa. In particular, starting from a standard environment providing remote access to a set of experiments, the telelaboratory is now organized as a collection of learning objects, i.e., modular didactic units designed following specific learning objectives within control systems and robotic fields. The telelaboratory has a remote web-based access which can be used both as a simulation environment and as a remote way of performing real physical experiments. The developed telelaboratory is based on free open-source software such as Scilab/Scicos, Comedi, and Real-Time Application Interface patch for Linux kernels. In-house software tools, such as a Java wEb Hyper modUlar inTerface sYstem, graphic environment tools, and a virtual laboratory interface based on Java applets, have been developed as a support for the learning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]