Teaching process control with Scilab and Scicos

Most process control courses rely on MATLAB/Simulink to fulfil, at least partially, their simulation needs. Albeit this choice represents a standard and rather satisfactory solution, the availability of such commercial software in academia should not be taken for granted. This paper shows that with some adjustments and moderate additional effort, teaching material developed with MATLAB/Simulink can be successfully replaced by equivalent material developed with Scilab/Scicos, a free and open source computing environment