An experience of teaching industrial automation for industrial engineering undergraduate students

This paper describes the experience of teaching industrial automation to Brazilian industrial engineering undergraduate students at University Center of FEI based on software tools associated with an integrated manufacturing laboratory. The manufacturing laboratory has got three complete manufacturing cells integrated by computer. At first approach an analytical analysis of the automated process is carried out. In the sequence, the manufacturing laboratory is used, combined with software tools, to provide to the industrial engineering student a powerful analysis capability of how to use these kinds of systems to improve product quality and production performance. To do that, computational models are implemented using software tools like Visual Object Net++, Promodel^® and WEB support. It was observed that such strategy has been producing excellent learning results.