Remote Control of the FESTO MPS PA Compact Workstation for the Development of a Remotely Accessible Process Control Laboratory

The technical education sector of the UAE adopts hands-on dominated curricula with the aim of meeting the industrial needs of highly qualified technical personnel with significant practical experience in their field. The utilization of remotely accessible laboratories is one of the technologies that is expected to have a significant role in improving the attainment of hands-on skills. This paper presents the design and implementation of a LabVIEW software interface to remotely control the FESTO MPS PA compact workstations. This workstation is commonly used as laboratory equipment and for training in the process-control filed. To showcase the developed remotely accessible process control laboratory, Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) and ON/OFF controllers were designed and implemented on the system. The proposed remotely accessible process control laboratory offers practical and industrial training over the Internet. This feature could open doors for sharing the laboratory's resources between higher educational institutes of the UAE. Which is expected to result in the optimal utilization of the available resources. The proposed remotely accessible process control laboratory is expected to have a major cost reduction of the usually high education system cost through the efficient utilization of the available laboratory equipment.