REV 2013 - Grid Remote Laboratory Management System: Sahara Reaches Europe

Grid Remote Laboratory Management System: Sahara Reaches Europe

Mohamed Tawfik, Elio Sancristobal, María José Albert, Gabriel Díaz, Manuel Castro

Electrical & Computer Engineering DepartmentSpanish University for Distance Education (UNED)

David Lowe, Steve Murray, Michel de la Villefromoy, Michael Diponio,

Faculty of Engineering and ITUniversity of Technology, Sydney (UTS)

The implementation of practical sessions in engineering education:

• Paves the way for students to be familiar with the instruments and thus, with the industrial real-world.

• Augment the learning outcomes by strengthening the understanding of scientific concepts and theories.

Remote laboratories facilitates the practical sessions availability providing on-line ubiquitous workbenches unconstrained by neither temporal nor geographical considerations.

Remote laboratories are those laboratories that can be controlled and administrated online. They differ from the virtual simulated laboratories as they are interacting with physical instruments.

Recently, remote laboratories have been developed at multiple universities and adopted in engineering education. Furthermore, some of these laboratories are replicated at many universities such as the electronic circuit’s remote labs: NetLab, VISIR, and labs based on NI ELVIS II.

This was the commence of a new mainstream which advocates a better remodeling of those laboratories to allow their allocation, sharing among universities, and their communication with other heterogeneous systems, e.g., Learning Management Systems (LMS).

In this context, numerous sharable educational architectures for remote labs integration have emerged such as LiLa, Lab2go, ISILab, DCL, WebLab Deusto, iLab (ISA), and Labshare (Sahara).

I. Integration with Metadata Repository

II. Integration with Learning Management Systems (LMSs)

Students

Lab1

….

Lab2

LMS

Provided Services:· Administrative tools· Scheduling· Synchronous and asynchronous

communication tools· Assessment and tracking tools· Multimedia sharing tools· Standard compatibility

….

….

III. Integration with Remote Laboratory Management Systems (RLMSs)

USERS

RLMS

Lab ServersEquipments

…...

…...

Diferent Remote Lab Systems

· Common Access Portal· Management· Administrative Tools· Communication Tools· ..· Other

GOLC: Global Online Laboratory Consortium

• The GOLC consortium is focused on promoting the development and sharing of, and research into remotely accessible laboratories for educational use.

• The GOLC partners include most of the pioneers in remote laboratories development and deployment.

http://online-lab.org/

GOLC: Global Online Laboratory Consortium

• The trend in researching within GOLC is to create standard APIs that allows communication with different remote laboratory systems that adhere to this standard.

• For instance, users of Sahara could access experiments integrated in iLab and vice versa.

USER Lab ServerArchitecture

iLab (ISA)

LabShare (Sahara)

LabShare (Sahara)• Access to more than a dozen types of rigs, with another dozen

types under construction, and over 50 individual rigs.• Installed at more than 4 Australian universities.

Labs at DIEEC-UNED

Labs at DIEEC-UNED

Labs at DIEEC-UNED

Labs at DIEEC-UNED

Labs at DIEEC-UNED

Web Server

Lab Server

User Interface

OR

ORAccess Portal

RDP

Embedded LabVIEW Panel

Custom builtLab Admin

Web Admin

Users

Generic Remote lab Architecture

Web Server

Lab Server

User Interface

OR

ORAccess Portal

RDP

Embedded LabVIEW Panel

Custom builtLab Admin

Web Admin

Users

Challenges in integrating our remote labs within an RLMS such as Sahara

The diversity of interfaces of contemporary developed remote labs leads to considering creating standard API layer for each interface type and thus facilitate their integration in RLMSs.

Challenges in integrating our remote labs within an RLMS such as Sahara

There exist a wide variety of technologies for the communication between client-server:

Desktop Sharing security problems

• Virtual Network Computing (VNC)very slow

• Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) limited to a single connection Common Gateway Interface (CGI) performance problems ActiveX and Java Applets plugins required

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) plugins required LabVIEW Web server only with LabVIEW applications

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) the actual trend

Each of these solutions have its relative advantages and disadvantages, which are well discussed in the paper. However, the trend is more shifted towards web standards such as AJAX and Web services. On the mean time for LabVIEW applications LabVIEW web interface is the common choice.

LabVIEW is a de-facto standard in remote laboratories development. Taking into account that other solutions such as RIAs and CGI are no longer preferred as discussed in the first section. Thus, hundreds of LabVIEw based remote labs have been developed at several universities, which have arisen an important question: how to manage and share all these all these laboratories using RLMSs.

Challenges in integrating remote labs within an RLMS such as Sahara

Case Study: LabVIEW-based re

mote labs

USERS

RLMS

Lab Servers Equipments…...

…...

Diferent LabVIEW-based Remote Labs

…...Standard

API

Challenges in integrating remote labs within an RLMS such as Sahara

The solution is to create standard API to integrate LabVIEW based remote labs within a RLMS. This is new research path of our upcoming work

For more information about remote laboratories, we invite you to access to the web page of the Electrical & Computer Engineering department of the UNED.

http://ohm.ieec.uned.es/

Research on Technologies for Engineering Education

Thanks for your Attention!

Mohamed Tawfik, Elio Sancristobal, María José Albert, Gabriel Díaz, Manuel Castro

Electrical & Computer Engineering DepartmentSpanish University for Distance Education (UNED)

David Lowe, Steve Murray, Michel de la Villefromoy, Michael Diponio,

Faculty of Engineering and ITUniversity of Technology, Sydney (UTS)