An interactive electronic book approach for teaching computer implementation of industrial control systems

There is an overall consensus on the importance of laboratory work that exposes the students to broader and more practical issues of industrial control systems, such as their implementation by distributed computer systems (DCSs) and programmable logic controllers (PLCs). However, setting up appropriate laboratory facilities to serve this purpose is expensive. For this reason, an interactive learning environment has been developed around the concept of the electronic book. The architecture of the environment allows the integration of hypertext with simulators of DCS, PLC, and process operation. The simulators are specially designed to serve an application-oriented teaching approach, which involves the student in the simulation setup and the running of the application. They are able to simulate not only the execution of the software that realizes the regulatory control algorithms but also the start-up and emergency control strategies of an industrial process, the manual, automatic, and cascade modes of controller operation, and the man-machine interface of a DCS- or PLC-based control system. The applications on which the teaching of DCS and PLC-based control system implementation is based are the interactive advanced control of a distillation column and the pH control of a reactor solution.