Manuscript received August 10, 2022; revised September 20, 2022; accepted November 25, 2022.
Abstract—The Covid-19 pandemic has made online learning
the main choice in learning modes. For control engineering
education that requires substantial laboratory practices as part
of the learning process, online learning is a challenge in itself. It
is difficult for students to gain experience and understanding of
physical phenomena through online learning. Two approaches
are commonly used to provide learning experiences that
resembles practices in a traditional laboratory, namely virtual
laboratory and remote laboratory. The drawback of virtual
laboratory is that simulation eliminate the interaction aspect
with physical devices make students miss the mental
experiences of dealing with physical objects that important for
engineering students, while the remote laboratory requires high
cost and less flexible. This paper proposes another approach to
overcome the shortcomings by utilizing a technology known as
Digital Twin. Digital Twin based laboratory provides digital or
virtual twin of a physical system that are interconnected with
one another via the internet. The interconnection of the physical
system and its virtual twin preserve the physical interaction and
also increase the flexibility of the laboratory. Preliminary
implementation and experiments show that the propose
approach works properly. Users are able to manipulate the real
plant remotely, and to observe almost identical dynamics of the
real plant and the 3D visualization of the virtual plant.
Index Terms—Digital twin, remote lab, virtual lab, control engineering, cloud technology
The authors are with the Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Pelita
Harapan, Tangerang, Indonesia.
*Correspondence: hendra.tjahyadi@uph.edu (H.T.)
Cite: Hendra Tjahyadi*, Kusno Prasetya, and I. Made Murwantara, "Digital Twin Based Laboratory for Control Engineering Education," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 704-711, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).