A remote and virtual PLC laboratory via smartphones

In today's technological world, the role of information and communication technology in education and training is quite important. This could lead to enhancing engineering education and training with smart development of appropriate tools and frameworks. PLCs are among the most widely used control tools in various industries. Therefore developing remote and virtual PLC laboratories for education and training could be very helpful. It should also be noted that real PLC laboratories are quite expensive and not simply available in many universities. This paper introduces a framework and some related techniques to develop remote and virtual laboratories for PLC's via common smartphones and a number of advanced programming software. The proposed approach is implemented and verified on some experimental set up. The results show the effectiveness of the proposition and opens ways for further developments.