Open architecture environment for control engineering education

The integration of dynamic models from the various branches of control system engineering into laboratory settings is a familiar means of providing real experience to students. The main objective of this paper is to introduce the concept of open architecture application in educational control laboratories and to discuss the advantages of this approach. The presentation is based on the examples of open architecture demonstration tools developed in the Control Laboratory of the Institute of Automatics in Krakow. The application of these tools to a commercial digital servo trainer is also described. In contrast with other approaches the environment includes commercial analysis and simulation tools popular with control engineers.