Control validation of D.E.S systems: Application to remote laboratories

Objectives of Automation courses are knowledge and know-how transfer to students. It is important for learner to control locally or remotely real systems composed of many sensors and actuators. The use of these devices poses several problems. Firstly, it is difficult to adapt them to the student’s level (from beginner to expert). Secondly, these systems are generally designed with industrial components. An error on the control-command design can involve safety problems and breakdowns. Technologies today allow remote use of plant. That makes it possible to improve the availability of the work practice rooms but ask pedagogy and safety questions. In this paper, we propose an original solution to solve these 2 problems. In order to guarantee the safety of the operators and the equipment, an approach using a validation filter is proposed. It is based on the logical constraints which should in no case to be violated. In order to adapt the difficulty level, it is proposed to modify the level of automation. For that, the functional dimension of the automation system is modified to adapt the student’s level of autonomy. In order to validate the approach, we applied it to an original project with 10 year old children on a packaging system.