TOWARDS USAGE OF COMBINED EXERCISES IN LEARNING OF LOW COST CONTROLLERS

The paper outlines our experience with combined educational exercises consisting of virtual and physical parts and they are suitable for training courses of low cost programmable logical controllers (PLCs). First of all, we introduce our training approach based on utilizing real PLCs connected to software simulations of industrial processes. The simulation offers possibility to select the complexity of a controlled task, e.g. a presence of random malfunctions. Tutors assign proper grades to students according to the quality of their programs but their testing often leads to time-consuming operations. For simple educational tasks, we have made successful experiments with formal methods based on partial search of state space of automata, which we present in the second part of the paper. Finally, we consider possible applications of our approach for a remote learning.