Teaching Fieldbus Standards to Computer Engineering Students

This paper describes the rationale and the methodology behind a senior-level elective course offered on fieldbus standards to computer engineering students. Although new digital fieldbus standards have major advantages over the traditional process control technologies, the acceptance of these standards have been rather slow because of the steep learning curves. As a result of increased popularity of these standards in this region, there is a strong demand for fieldbus knowledgeable engineers. The course has been offered twice and has been popular among senior students. In this paper, the experiences, the resources used for the course, and the student survey results are summarized.