MULTIFUNCTIONAL REMOTE LABORATORY FOR EDUCATION IN AUTOMATIC CONTROL: THE CRAUTOLAB EXPERIENCE

This paper describes the experience gathered in the last years due to the creation and development of an automatic control laboratory suitable for remote use via the Web. First, the principles that guide the laboratory design and evolution are stated and motivated. Then, an overview of the laboratory is given, describing its architecture and the most important technological solutions adopted. The available experiments are described, and some pedagogical considerations are reported. Finally, some general ideas are presented that reflect the authors’ experience and opinion on the use of remote laboratories in control education

Model order reduction for object-oriented models: a control systems perspective

In recent years several concepts and tools for modelling and simulation of nonlinear heterogeneous and multi-domain systems have been developed, speeding up to a great extent the process of an accurate analysis by simulation of increasingly complex technological systems. In parallel, for dimensioning and, above all, for control system design purposes, the need of models of reduced complexity has emerged, together with the need of tools capable of extracting, from the overall dynamic model, reduced models, representing the dominant behaviour. The paper reviews recent results in nonlinear model order reduction, originally developed with reference to computer aided analysis and design of electronic circuits, and puts them in a control system design oriented perspective, pointing out interesting future research directions

Parallel Simulation of Equation-based Object-Oriented Models with Quantized State Systems on a GPU

This work focuses on the use of parallel hardware to improve the simulation speed of equation-based object-oriented Modelica models. With this intention,a method has been developed that allows for the translation of a restricted class of Modelica models to parallel simulation code, targeted for the Nvidia Tesla architecture and based on the Quantized State Systems(QSS) simulation algorithm. The OpenModelica Compiler (OMC) has been extended with a new back-end module for automatic generation of the simulation code that uses the CUDA extensions to the C language to be executable with a General Purpose Graphic Processing Unit (GPGPU). Preliminary performance measurments of a small example model havebeen done on the Tesla architecture