A Novel Design of Virtual Laboratory

The rapid growth of the manufacturing, automotive, robotics, and smart-grid industries will require engineers that posses attributes related to multidisciplinary formation and strong tools to design solutions to complex problems. The engineer's formation requires to include the development of multidisciplinary abilities into their programs and backing the theory with real-world practice. In this sense, specialized laboratories are necessary in order to carry out this kind of formation and training. However, the lack of specialized laboratories is one of the main obstacles preventing us from reaching this objective. The specialized laboratories require specialized installation, maintenance and cost management as well as a design that can accommodate a large number of students. In contrast, the virtual laboratories are one tool that can be used to deal with both issues which are the lack of specialized engineers and the absence of specialized laboratories. This work proposes a new design of a virtual laboratory in order to specialize engineers in several fields such as power electronics, electric machines, automatic control, and information and computational technologies. The laboratory proposed includes tools such as co-simulation, co-modeling, and co-design in order to face complex problems within the industry.