Remote Control of Automation

—Objectives of technical courses are knowledge and know-how transfer to students. In the case of Discrete Events Systems courses, it is important for learner to control locally or remotely real systems (or plants) composed of many sensors and actuators. The use of these devices poses several problems. Firstly, it is difficult to adapt them to the student's level (from beginner to expert). Secondly, these systems are generally designed with industrial components. An error on the control-command design can involve safety problems and breakdowns. In this paper, they propose an original solution to solve these 2 problems. In order to guarantee the safety of the operators and the equipment, an approach using a validation filter is proposed. It is based on the definition of logical constraints which, should in no case be violated. In order to adapt the difficulty level, it is proposed to modify the level of automation. For that, the functional dimension of the automation system is modified to adapt the student's level of autonomy. The level of automation is defined by the teacher by the mean of a functional analysis of the system. In order to validate the approach, they applied it to an original project with 10 year old children on a packaging system. The aim of the project was to enable " young novice control engineers " to perform their first Programmable Logic Controller program to control the whole system.