Moodle-Enabled Virtual Lab for Fieldbus Process Control

Abstract

The paper presents a Moodle-enabled remote laboratory intended to teach the principles of process control using the Foundation Fieldbus technology. The student logs into Moodle and accesses a “Virtual PC” learning activity that opens a private remote desktop with all set to run an FF simulator. Behind the scenes, a virtualization infrastructure, hosted on the Azure cloud, handles storage, cloning and deployment of virtual machines. The paper explains how this infrastructure was set up and how it works internally. Positive results were achieved with a limited number of students, on an elective course, making us believe that this infrastructure can be extended to highly populated courses.

Keywords

• remote lab
• virtual machine
• virtual desktop
• azure
• moodle
• process control
• foundation fieldbus