A Framework to Simplify the Creation of Remote Laboratories

Abstract

Building remote laboratories is not a trivial issue since they are complex systems in which a great number of factors (security, QoS, integration of information of different nature, etc.) are involved. This complexity requires the use of diverse technologies that complicate the creation of the laboratories. Current work presents a framework to ease the creation of remote laboratories (both real and virtual) from a set of reusable blocks that solve most common issues (connection, student management, experiments assessment, etc.) so the designers of the experiments may concentrate on their functionality. The followed approach proposes the use of certain technologies widely used in the control engineering community such as Labview and EJS, so the creation of a new laboratory will require the creation of two applications separately that will be integrated within the framework: (1) One Labview application to acquire process information and (2) a Java applet created with EJS used as graphical interface. The proposed framework was used with a water level automatic system to show how to add new experiments to the framework.