Abstract:

The ability to monitor information from an industrial plant has become a fundamental knowledge for future engineers and thus a necessary curriculum parameter in the Industry 4.0 era. The data coming and going from sensors and actuators present in the manufacturing process must be analyzed for decision-making in several control and command applications. For the visualization of these data to happen efficiently, Digital Twin techniques can help generate automatic virtualization of the real plant.

This research is constructed upon a system called Virtual Setup, which can collect data from a real plant and automatically digitize it in a graphic model that represents the plant and its information. This system is composed of a three-element architecture: Control Element, Data Acquisition Module, and Virtualization Platform. The control element is a software implemented in industrial computers capable of capturing the changes in the state of the input and output elements according to the operation of the process. The data acquisition module collects the information from the plant elements utilizing communication protocols such as Modbus and OPC-UA and sends this information periodically to the Virtualization Platform. This platform is a website that is responsible for performing the registration of the control elements, supervising the changes of plant parameters, and graphically presenting the real plant.

The process's behavior is acquired by monitoring the changes in the states of their components' inputs and outputs registered in the system. The virtualization may be used for decision-making action on the real plant and to show the process's basic characteristics. Examples of such activities are the measurement of the triggering time of a sensor or actuator, the acquisition of the production time of each machine, or the analysis of data from its operation in real-time.

The proposed system was used for teaching fundamental disciplines of automation in an engineering course. This approach is useful for students' learning and for educational institutions that do not have access to industrial machines to practice the technologies related to Industry 4.0.

This paper will detail how a physical didactic plant of an automation laboratory, was virtualized and its data were treated in a distance learning application. A learning module was created for the students to apply the knowledge received in the automation courses. Specifically, each student could build a program in the Ladder language in the virtualization platform and verify if the programming was successfully executed through the system's Digital Twin. As this plant was developed in a web platform, the students could use it at any time and place besides being able to share their results with other students.

This system goal was teaching engineering and was tested with exemplary programming activities. A manufacturing plant was simulated, where a product is inserted at the beginning of a conveyor belt and then assembled along the production line. The Virtual-Setup system operation was used for an educational activity, and the acquired knowledge can be used for future systems focused on Smart Learning or Adaptive Learning. The main contribution of this paper is the implementation of a tool for the engineering education area having practical learning activities autonomously and distantly.

Keywords:

Industry 4.0 Education, Virtual Engineering Laboratory, Long Distance Engineering Learning.