Time scheduling in a peer-to-peer remote access laboratory for STEM education

Remote Access Laboratories (RAL) are online environments that allow users to access instruments through the Internet. Such environments enable users to control equipment and collect data without being present in the laboratory. This also means that users work in a disjoint manner and cannot coordinate equipment usage directly with each other, as they would do in regular on-site laboratories. Remote laboratory management systems deal with scheduling users, as most instruments cannot process multiple users´ requests at the same time. Two scheduling strategies are predominantly used in RALs: time slotting and the queuing. This is straightforward in centralised, service-oriented environments, in particular, when instruments are available continuously throughout the day. In this paper, time scheduling in the context of a Distributed Peer-to-peer Remote laboratory featuring quest-based learning, is discussed. Here interaction with the entire system is organised around a set of learning activities or quests. This includes the experiments designed by users and the sharing of experiments by users. The providers of the experiments have the flexibility to put their systems online as per their capabilities. As such, the experiments availability become scarcer and must be judiciously assigned to the users who need them most.