Abstract:

A current challenge for engineering education involves keeping up with emerging technologies applied to modern industry. We live in the era of Industry 4.0, which is intended to be a technological leap based on data communication and artificial intelligence.

Industry 4.0 uses various technologies applied mainly to manufacturing to enable greater flexibility and collaboration between industrial processes. Among these technologies, one that currently reaches prominence is the Digital Twin (DT), a virtual representation of a physical system. The communication of values that represent the states of the physical device and the virtual device is bidirectional. In a manufacturing environment, the DT must provide information on each step of the process, such as data on production, consumption, and performance made available in real-time.

The implementation of this technology in production systems is complex and requires the domain of several disciplines. Besides the inherent theoretical knowledge of each technology, engineering students must solve practical problems close to the real world. During graduation, this objective is only achieved in controlled environments such as didactic laboratories. However, in emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic, this face-to-face access to laboratories was compromised.

Therefore, the need to offer access to industrial experiments in safe virtual environments was born. In this context, a set of tools and technologies were used to teach the Digital Twin concept remotely to undergraduate students throughout 2020 in our university.

As access to physical teaching plants was not possible, a virtual plant was built based on an existing model in our teaching lab. This virtual plant was implemented using Factory I/O software. The plant represented a production line and was virtualized to represent the largest number of sensors and actuators. A human-machine interface (HMI) was built using Node-RED to visualize the products of the manufacturing line. Moreover, in this same software, the DT was constructed through images. By applying a specific API, the plant pictures were animated, representing the movement of pieces along the production line until their final storage.

This approach allowed the practical engineering classes to continue despite not having access to the didactic laboratories. Throughout the article, we will explain the design decisions made step by step and the results obtained. We hope to contribute so that educators living in similar situations can adopt our solution and continue their practical classes.

Keywords:

Remote engineering laboratories, Industrial automation learning, Simulators in laboratory courses.