SPECIAL FOCUS PAPER ONLINE TEMPERATURE CONTROL SYSTEM Online Temperature Control System http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v9i2.4382 A. Ikhlef, M. Kihel, B. Boukhezzar, A. Guerroudj and N. Mansouri Université Constantine 1, Constantine, Algérie Abstract—In this paper, a remote temperature control sys- tem is proposed. The physical system is controlled in real time through an Internet network. For educational purpos- es, the students use only a web browser to tune and test a PID controller via a shared user interface. The PID parame- ters are calculated using basic experimental Ziegler-Nichols tuning rules. After the hardware and software experiment description, the remote online experiment is presented and the results are given. Index Terms—Electrical engineering, laboratories, online learning, PID controller, temperature system. I. INTRODUCTION The great success of the Internet has put new life into distance learning. Recently, many institutions have pro- posed internet-based courses and e-learning educational programs. e-Learning and internet-based tools and meth- odologies are active research fields. Experiments are an important part of educational pro- grams, particularly in engineering and experimental sci- ences such as physics and chemistry. However, the high cost and/or complexity of the experiments prevent the students from working in optimal conditions. In these cases, remote laboratories seem to be the best solution. The main aim of these laboratories is to share the same experimental equipment between a number of users spread throughout a given geographical area. Moreover, they provide remote access to hardware experiments without the necessity of people being displaced. Furthermore, other benefits are obtained by saving time and reducing the number of days of lab inactivity. Remote labs capitalize on the large diffusion of the In- ternet around the world. Essentially, they exploit web- based platforms to give an interactive interface to the users. This interface interacts directly with the remote hardware via requests-answers sent on the network. Many architectures and platforms are used to achieve these ob- jectives. From the user side, only a simple web browser (e.g., Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox) with an appro- priate plug-in is necessary (e.g., JRE for applets-based interfaces, runtime engine for a LabVIEW based remote experiments). In the domain of electrical engineering, many remote experiments and online laboratories have been designed [1-4]. Some of them deal with fundamental electronics experiments. The aim of this paper is to present the design details and test process of an online remote temperature system con- trol experiment. Beyond its classical aspect, this choice is motivated by the fact that the physical system is simple but relevant. Both identification and online PID controller design are included in the remote experiment. This paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the hardware and the software environment. In Section III, the objectives, technical content and procedures for the remote experiment are presented. This is done either from the experiment designers’ or administrators’ side or from the remote-student side. The remote experiment test is presented in Section IV. Finally, conclusions and some perspectives are given. II. EXPERIMENT DESCRIPTION The work described in this paper was performed within the framework of the Tempus e-Sience project (Euro- Maghribeen project financed by the European community) in which the university, Constantine1, is a partner. The main objective of this project was the use of new technol- ogies to develop e-Learning in the electrical engineering field, especially the implementation of remote labs for experimental work. A. Hardware Part In this part, the design of an interactive network struc- ture is represented. This structure allows students to su- pervise and control the temperature in an experimental system using a PID controller. This architecture allows the students to change the desired temperature value and the PID controller parameters during the experiment from any terminal connected to the Intranet or Internet network. Different kinds of network architectures can be used for an iLab [5]. The proposed network architecture is represented in Fig. 1, and the system used for this experiment is shown in Fig. 2. It is composed of a temperature measurement system, an acquisition card and a server. All these parts are con- nected according to the control loop given in Fig. 3. The block diagram shows a closed loop control system. The measured temperature is compared with a reference value. The difference between these two values is processed by a PID controller, which initiates actions to drive the differ- ence signal toward zero. Supervision and control of the system output are performed through a graphical user interface (GUI) developed in the Lab server. Figure 1. Online lab architecture 22 http://www.i-jim.org