Addressing software impact in the design of remote laboratories

• Author(s): Garcia-Zúbia, Javier ; Orduña, Pablo ; Lopez-de-Ipina, D. ; Alves, Gustavo R.
• Date: 2009
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/4453
• Origin: Repositório Científico do Instituto Politécnico do Porto
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

Remote Laboratories or WebLabs constitute a first-order didactic resource in engineering faculties. However, in many cases, they lack a proper software design, both in the client and server side, which degrades their quality and academic usefulness. This paper presents the main characteristics of a Remote Laboratory, analyzes the software technologies to implement the client and server sides in a WebLab, and correlates these technologies with the characteristics to facilitate the selection of a technology to implement a WebLab. The results obtained suggest the adoption of a Service Oriented Laboratory Architecture-based approach for the design of future Remote Laboratories so that client-agnostic Remote Laboratories and Remote Laboratory composition are enabled. The experience with the real Remote Laboratory, WebLab-Deusto, is also presented.