Educational platform for process controlling via Internet

This paper presents an educational platform which offers to students the possibilities to connect remotely via Internet to programmable logic controllers (PLCs) which will control, practically, any virtual process. In this way, several expensive resources like PLCs or powerful computers which simulate complex processes can be shared at distance and improve their time management. The processes simulated on computers have the great advantage of flexibility and it is free of dangerous events. Any person logged on a server can have a profile and load a script with his own process or a template one and start to control it with a real PLC. The process can be simulated in any program like Matlab or LabView. The interface between the real PLC and the virtual process running on a computer will be realized by an adaptor which emulates in real-time the signals from the simulated process. The adaptor has programmable analog/digital I/O with galvanic isolation and it can be easily configured from a Web application in order to suit the simulated process.