Developing Virtual Laboratories for Understanding the Automation Course

The development of virtual laboratory for learning expertise is a new way of learning in recent years. Compared with the traditional learning mode, the use of virtual laboratory to learn has many advantages, which is a new trend. Based the literature review, no opened source automation simulator was found to be able to communicate with TIA Portal. Therefore, this paper proposes an open sourced simulator made with Unity to explain the communication between the simulator and TIA Portal through the S7.net library developed by Siemens. Develop a virtual laboratory through the communication between them, conduct co-simulation, and better understand the automation course. By integrating a simulator to education process, we also collected and analyzed feedback of students on the interest to work with simulators. The proposed simulator and supporting materials are available online: https://github.com/kholodilinivan/DemoUnityandTIAPortal.