A Web-based control of a real laboratory for process engineering education

Our time is branded by the orientation towards e-learning in several education fields. Yet, the remote teaching means satisfying the needs of specific engineering studies remain limited to simulated applications or virtual laboratories which involve a reduced assimilation of the taught material. This paper introduces a real laboratory control based on a Web embedded system and an interactive Web application. The laboratory is designed for process engineering education. In order to conceive a Web-based process management for learning features, five essential design issues have been investigated: requirement specification, architecture selection, system implementation, design of a Web-based human-computer interface, and an access control system for the interactive learning environment and work validation. A didactic lift is used as an engineering educational process to demonstrate our design methodology. A set of software modules is embedded in the local control system in order to be shared by multiple communicating users. Time delay due to Internet traffic has been overcome by using miniature Web server dedicated to the Web-based laboratory supervision and control. The experimental results have shown that the Internet-based real laboratory offers similar behaviour to a local laboratory.