Educational platform for working with programmable logic controllers

The restructuring and the reorganization of the educational teaching system has comprehended not only the academic teaching curriculum and management system but also the teaching methods. Educational platforms and virtual laboratories are increasingly becoming a key component during the teaching process especially for technical teaching. Although the existence of virtual laboratories and e-learning platforms can be very useful tools for electrical engineering in particular they will never replace real laboratories. The main reason is that using real educational platforms the students have the opportunity to become familiar with the basic principles and real elements of a particular area. Moreover, they can develop various complex applications and test their behavior. In the end, the main objective is that the present students — future engineers should be able to both operate real world systems and implement designed solutions that are likewise the teaching platforms. In this vein it is proposed a platform based on the programmable logic controllers (PLC) technology that has not been done so far. It is designed to be open enabling to add new modules and features. While the considered platform is based on a specific brand of PLC it can be very easily adapted without major technical issues to other brands.