IMPLEMENTATION OF E-LEARNING CONCEPT FOR INDUSTRIAL CONTROL SYSTEM. A CASE STUDY

The University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest enlarges the range of teaching methodologies by introducing e-learning and teaching using Web technologies. The engineering studies are the most costly direction of education system. The quality of engineering studies is strongly related to used equipments and professional training. To build new laboratories or replicate ones for teaching and learning of each discipline in engineering sciences is not reliable. The development of hardware and software techniques helps us to create virtual version of real equipments and to efficient share of existing resources for teaching. This paper presents the design and implementation of a web application for process simulation with micro-service system architecture. The implemented solution is using an embedded PC with Modbus communication for data acquisition. A RESTful Web Service (API) with Spring Boot framework is used for designing the micro service and additional technologies as Java, Mysql/mongodb, AngularJS, HTML5, JQuery, etc., are used for its implementation. Seeing its nature, a platform for eLearning, will not scale well in a monolithic architecture, that why we look for alternatives such as micro-service architecture, which its strong points: scalability and flexibility. The nature of this platform is presented to be a cluster of different applications that will coexist and interact on environments that suits the course installations and already present infrastructure (hardware and software). The presented case studies of e-learning laboratories for control engineering sciences are from the power system field. The implemented system allows simulating the industrial process and design or testing the implementation of different control scheme in simulation or using industrial automation components as Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) or embedded computers.