10th IFAC Symposium Advances in Control Education

The International Federation of Automatic Control

August 28-30, 2013. Sheffield, UK

Virtual and Remote Laboratories for Industrial Automation E-learning

J.R. Caldas Pinto*, Sá da Costa, J.M.G.*

*IDMEC/,IST, Technical University of Lisbon

Portugal (Tel: 351-218417313; e-mail: jcpinto@dem.ist.utl.pt and sadacosta@dem.ist.utl.pt).

Abstract: Nowadays one of the fundamental aspects of industrial automation concerns modeling discrete
manufacturing processes and their control through Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC). These
subjects, apparently distinct, are indeed related because PLC programming in most cases are based on
these models. Another essential topic is the use of SCADA systems and web panels as part of the
monitoring process. Teaching these subjects require intensive use of laboratories with dedicated equipment
and software. The problem arises when the course has more than one hundred students and the university
policy is not to spend too many resources in teaching labs. This paper presents our last solution to the
problem based on virtual experimental setups and the use of a remote laboratory with web panels and
LabVIEW interfaces. The solution has been tested successfully and very important, using legal software at
free cost for the student.
Keywords: e-learning, PLC, SCADA, LabVIEW, Saia-Burgess

architecture and programming languages of PLC in order

1. INTRODUCTION
Industrial Automation is one semester course lectured in
the 3th year of the Integrated Master of Science course in
Mechanical Engineer, at Instituto Superior Técnico,
University of Lisbon. The course has an effective period
of lectures of about 3 months and runs with about 200
students.
This course gives a general overview of industrial
automation components for sensing, handling and control
and technologies behind, namely electric, pneumatic and
hydraulic. During the course students are encouraged to
participate in visits to factories and are put in contact with
the existing laboratory of Automation where there is a
manufacturing cell with a conveyor, machines tools,
robots, automated guided vehicles and warehouses. (Fig.
1).
to perform control of some manufacturing processes. The
students involvement with PLC programming lasts less
than 12 weeks.
This Industrial Automation course has been supported for
more than 30 years by a specific laboratory with the usual
basic components, (Fig. 2). In the past, the presence of
students in this laboratory used to be 3h per week,
currently is allocated an average of half an hour per week.
The reduction in time of the presence of students in the
laboratory is mainly due to the big number of students
that would imply large number of teaching staff what
would be too expensive. However, students need to
program PLC and consequently to be evaluated with
demonstrations of required processes control. These have
to be done during laboratory classes. With a total number
of 7 hour per semester in the laboratory and three design
exercises to perform there is only time for evaluation and
not for development.

Fig.1. Industrial cell

After this initialisation students are prepared to study Fig.2. Typical elements of a classroom laboratory
discrete events modelling tools, GRAFCET and Petri (current configuration): conveyor with a web camera,
nets, with special emphasis to the first one, and learn the pneumatic cylinders, lift and several switches and la

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10th IFAC ACE
August 28-30, 2013. Sheffield, UK

mps.
The only possible solution is to allow students to work at
home. However, the implementation of this solution
raises a set of practical difficulties. Indeed we need not
only that students learn to program PLC but also that they
manage to write programs that are completely functional
when are run in the laboratory. It means they have to
control exactly the same “setups”. Software licences is
another constraint to deal with, they have to be free to
students during the course duration.
The developed solution corresponds, indeed, to two
complementary solutions that can be used together. They Fig. 3. Remote laboratory: 4 PLC connected to
are the object of the next sections. Section 2 introduces experimental setups and for with no physical connections.
the different hardware and software components of the
solution, Section 3 presents their integration in two For video streaming there exists in the remote lab a
complementary solutions that can be gathered in a third webcam located, approximately, at 2.5 meters of the
solution. Finally in section 4 conclusions are drawn about stations.
the impact of these solutions in the students learning and
evaluation. The 8 PLC and the video camera are connected to a
server and constitute a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
We finally note that this paper does not concern generic The general architecture of this network is represented in
theory about remote and virtual laboratories and their Fig. 4.
architectures. There is a vast literature on this field
included in the area of industrial automation and system
control see e.g. Palma et al. (2011), Gabriel et al. (2011),
Ammari et al. (2006), Domínguez et al. (2008) and
Cardozo et al. (2012).
Fig. 4. Architecture of the remote laboratory network
2. COMPONENTS OF THE SOLUTION
2.3 PLC
2.1 Classroom laboratory
All the PLC used in both labs are Saia-Burgess, Saia-
The classroom laboratory (CL) has eight workbenches. Burgess (2013), covering different models from already
Each workbench has one Personal Computer connected to discontinued models till quite recent ones.
a PLC that allows controlling the following equipment:
The reason to use these PLC is historical and related with
 3 pneumatic cylinders and associated sensors software licences. For over 15 years has been Saia-
Burgess policy to give free licenses of its software PG5 to
 1 linear conveyor connected to a web camera our labs and licences with 3 months validity to students at
home, enough time to run the design exercises. These
 1 elevator (only three benches) PLC are quite robust and the associated software, the
SaiaPG5 project manager, provides from low level to
 1 cross road traffic lights simulator (only 4 benches)
high level GRAFCET based programming languages,
 It is also equipped with different type of pushbuttons, without restrictions related to the licence.
proximity sensors, an alarm and lights.
2.4 Webserver based HMI's
Fig 2. illustrates on of these workbenches.
It is a quite recent trend in the PLC industry the
2.2 Remote laboratory integration of Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) as web
pages in PLC, acting these as servers. In general these
The remote laboratory (RL) has 8 PLC. Each PLC host pages are hosted in flash memory cards, in general of
web pages acting as web panels. Four of these PLC are type SD, but with proprietary formatting. This
connected to experimental setups (stations) made up of 3 enormously simplifies the PLC interface, because the
pneumatic cylinders and several lights (Fig. 3). The other only thing the user should have is a browser.
four PLC have no physical connections to stations.
Web pages can be designed by any HTML editor.
However, Saia provides a proprietary Web Editor that

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August 28-30, 2013. Sheffield, UK
simplifies the web pages design and its connection with
the PLC variables. It presents some limitations but not
restrictive enough for our purpose. New improvements
are already announced by the Saia-Burgess.
The PLC web pages constitute indeed a SCADA
(supervisory control and data acquisition) since they
allow human operators to easily monitor and control the
plant.
Saia also provides free licenses to this Web Editor
software to the students. Within our course, with large
number of students, they are not supposed to design their
own web pages. This can be done in small and more
specialized courses.
2.5 LabVIEW
LabVIEW from National Instruments (NI), LabVIEW
(2013) is a well-known development environment for
creating custom applications that interact with physical
world. It can be used to design SCADA systems and
indeed it is largely used in industry. LabVIEW is
installed in the computers of the laboratory and in the
students’ personal computers.
LAbVIEW is quite complete with modules in the area of
signals, control systems and automation. In particular we
will use it to build a SCADA system. Its software
packages respectively, NI Vision Development and NI
Vision Acquisition Software will be used to build a
computer vision application as seen later.
The University has a LabVIEW campus license that
provides not too expensive licences to our laboratory
computers. Students can download free demo full
versions with a validity of 7+45 days, that is compatible
with the student’s need during the course.
3. THE PROPOSED SOLUTION
We remember that our goal is not only to provide a
platform that allows students to practice the PLC
programming at the classroom laboratory and at home,
but also it should be guaranteed that students are able to
completely develop and test the programs to control the
CL experimental setups in a very short time.
With the components defined in the previous section
there are two ways to build SCADA systems that allow
us to design two different solutions. In the following we
present them as well as a third solution that result from
the combination of the previous ones.
3.1 A webpage based SCADA for the remote PLC.
As said before our intention is that students may easily
run in the CL the programs developed in the remote lab
(RL). For that it will be necessary that devices present in
the CL are also present in the RL. For simpler programs
we have some cylinders and lights controlled by the
remote PLC. This solution is quite limited for more
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complex programming. So we decide to emulate all the
CL equipment virtually in the PLC hosted web page.
With this we have built a hybrid laboratory where the
PLC are remote, some physical devices are present and
then remotely controlled, and other only exist virtually in
a webpage hosted in the PLC (see Fig. 5). This webpage
is hosted in the flash drive of the PLC that is locked to
avoid unauthorized modifications of this page. Students
upload the program to the PLC through the Saia program
manager.
These webpages were designed with the contributions of
other students of more advanced courses but can also be
easily designed by the teaching staff.
Naturally all these accesses have to be preceded by a
connection to the VPN.
Finally, we should note that with SaiaPG5 all the
variables can be referred by a symbolic name. These
names are organized in a table with the correspondence
between those names and their value defined by their type
(flag, register, input, output, …) and address. For
example, a device as RedLight will correspond to a flag
with a given address in the RL and to an output with
another address in the CL. So, only this table has to be
swapped when students change from the RL to the CL. A
truncated symbol table for the RL and the CL is
illustrated in Fig. 6.
Fig. 5. Web panel for the Remote lab
3.2 A LabVIEW SCADA for the remote PLC.
LabVIEW software can communicate with any PLC in a
variety of ways. OLE for Process Control (OPC) defines
the standard for communicating real-time plant data
between control devices and human machine interfaces,
National Instruments (2013). Virtually all the PLC have
OPC servers, what naturally includes the SaiaPLC.
However, they are expensive for the university.
The Saia communication library, SComm, was made
available to us some years ago to build an old C++
interface reported in Caldas Pinto (2006). Students from
the computer science course created another library that
encapsulates it. LabVIEW allows the dynamic loading of
libraries compiled in windows for dll files (Dynamic-link
10th IFAC ACE
August 28-30, 2013. Sheffield, UK

library). Through that library LabVIEW can use its
functions directly so getting full access to the PLC. So no
OPC is necessary.
The SComm based library, loaded by LabVIEW allows
not only communication with physically connected PLC
but also via TCP/IP. So, it is possible to use a LabVIEW
SCADA with the remote PLC. The virtual devices
presented in the webpage can be represented in this
SCADA making unnecessary the PLC webpage. The first
obvious advantage is to give students the possibility to
modify their interface without jeopardizing the work of
colleagues.
Then our third solution is the more versatile, despite
being a little more complex.
Summarizing, the advantages of this solution are:
 Students use exactly the same local interface in both
labs, CL and RL.
 Students can practice with SCADA software at home
adding new virtual devices. As can be foreseen there
are quite a large number of degrees of freedom that
have to be managed carefully.
 This computer vision module runs different
applications developed within a Computer Vision
course, what means that the available number of
applications may increase every year.

 We have seen above that CL benches do not have

exactly the same equipment. For example only three
benches have lifts. Using this LAbVIEW SCADA,
those can be completed with virtual lifts.
Figure 7 visualize the current interface. It can be
observed a set of pushbuttons and the possibility to
read/write flags, registers and text. These tools are quite
useful for an easy monitoring of the PLC variables in an
academic environment.
We easily observe that there are some redundancy using
both the web panel and this SCADA. One solution is to
build a simplified version of this SCADA to use at home.
Fig. 6. Symbols table (truncated)
With this solution also implemented there is no need to
have web pages hosted on the PLC.
However, it is psychologically more educative to transmit
the idea to students that they are controlling a real plant
using a remote interface. In this case the process although
virtual it is remotely located. Not to speak that some
remote PLC are connected to real devices whose
behaviour can be viewed by a web camera.

3.3 A SCADA for the remote and Classroom

Laboratory

A third solution is to use both the web page and the
LabVIEW SCADA. The web page represents a plant that
is remotely installed and the LAbVIEW SCADA
represents a local plant that can be modified according to
the problems. Both are controlled by the same PLC.
This solution has another feature. As described before
there exists in the CL a web camera in a conveyor to
illustrate the use of computer vision in automation. Image
processing software was includes in the old C++ interface
referred above. Currently students from a computer
vision course use LabVIEW to train some image
processing applications. This has suggested that
LabVIEW SCADA, that can also be directly connect to
the PLC, could be extended with a computer vision
module and used in the CL, and even at home with some
imagination.
Fig. 7. LabVIEW SCADA for the classroom laboratory
5. WORK ORGANIZATION
At the beginning of the semester it is assigned to each
group (normally of two or three students) one workbench
in the CL and another one in the RL. Then we have ten
groups per Remote PLC, what is affordable. We also
encourage students to constitute a forum to be in an easy
contact among them to an efficient use of the RL. This
year students decided to organize Facebook groups.
There are about ten groups that correspond to a number
of students between 16 and 24 per group that is still easily
manageable.

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August 28-30, 2013. Sheffield, UK
Students are instructed how to connect to a VPN and to
download the Saia Project Manager. Meanwhile Saia-
Burgess representative has provided the students three
months PG5 licence.
The first introductory design exercise should be simple
and will use only the PLC web pages. There is no use of
LabVIEW. It will be presented in the CL with the same
devices. Students are encouraged to use their own
computers to minimize the start-up time. Cables are
provided for physical connection with the PLC.
In the second and third design exercise students are
required to install the LabVIEW student package. We
provide the necessary Visual Instruments files. In the
third design exercise students are authorised to change
the LabVIEW SCADA to build their own virtual devices
if desired.
Both exercises that are written for the remote laboratory
will be evaluated in the classroom laboratory. Naturally
students are assisted in all this process.
REFERENCES
At the end of this scholar year an inquiry was made to
161 students concerning the RL. Figure 8 shows the
answer to some selected questions.
Fig. 8. Some inquiry results (0- Definitively no; 5-
definitively yes)
6. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we presented our own solution to solve the
complex problem of conciliating the learning of time
consuming PLC programming with lack of resources and
short time of permanence of the students in the classroom
laboratories. Based on a set of 8 PLC connected in a
VPN three solutions were presented: (1) associate web
panels to each PLC with a virtual representation of all the
equipment presented in the classroom lab (2) Based on a
LabVIEW SCADA provided with a connection to the
PLC (3) Based on a LabVIEW SCADA together with the
web panel. This last solution models the situation where
the main plant and the controller are remote but some
other equipment faraway will also be controlled by the
same PLC.
Besides, the simplicity of the solution and the
standardization of the interface, it allows that the remote
laboratory to be used inside a network of remote
laboratories as long as passwords and LabVIEW files are
obtained.
This new solution was already tested with full success
with a first group of 10 students and it is currently being
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used in the second semester of 2012/2013 with 230
students.
We think that an access to the remote laboratory
controlled by the students themselves using forums that
they completely dominate, as Facebook, has advantages
as increasing social responsibility and encouraging
interaction. However a more sophisticated access control
should be implemented for utilization outside the scope
of the school. One possibility is the insertion of our
interface in the virtual environment Moodle – content
management software for e-learning.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported by the Strategic Project with
reference PEst-OE/EME/LA0022/2011, through FCT
(under the Unit IDMEC - Pole IST, Research Group
IDMEC/LAETA/CSI).
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