The seven engineering degrees of the Higher Technical School of Design Engineering (ETSID), Technical University of Valencia, include in their formation programs, subjects, and laboratory projects to instruct students in the aspects of the design, development, and validation of applications for process control, automation, industrial informatics, and embedded systems. Moreover, the authors participate in European projects of education such as the International Network of Embedded System (INES) and the European Project Semester (EPS), where exchange students remotely perform the first phase of their projects at ETSID from their home universities. To significantly reduce the cost of installing a huge number of real prototypes in labs and to fulfill the distance requirements of the exchange students, a remote laboratory architecture, i.e., simPROCes, has been designed. simPROCes not only permits the teleoperation of simulators/real prototypes but also allows that complete control applications be remotely tested and validated. simPROCes is precisely specified to be independent of the model of computer, data acquisition card, programming language, and operating system, and is transparent to the programmer and easy to use. This system is useful both for the education and development of control application purposes. A water tank process shows the installation procedure of simPROCes to test and validate control applications. The experience of applying simPROCes in the electronic engineering degree and within the framework of INES and EPS has been successfully rated by student surveys.

This paper presents a multidisciplinary problem-based learning (PBL) project consisting of the development of a robot arm prototype and the implementation of its control system. The project is carried out as part of Industrial Informatics (II), a compulsory third-year course in the Automation and Electronic Engineering (AEE) degree program at the School of Engineering at Universitat Politècnica de València, València, Spain. The robot arm is a low-cost prototype, initially controlled with a joystick. The aim of the project is, first, to design and implement a full control system for the robot, including the necessary circuitry for microcomputer (ARM Cortex)-based control and, second, to pit the designed robot in competition against other students' robots. Incorporation of multidisciplinary PBL required changes in the organization of the course, which features various learning activities and their continuous evaluation; it also required knowledge of five other courses in the AEE program. PBL methodology is compared to a traditional method; the results obtained proved highly satisfactory. Moreover, the PBL robotic experience was highly rated by some 900 students.

High-performance microprocessors, e.g., multithreaded and multicore processors, are being implemented in embedded real-time systems because of the increasing computational requirements. These complex microprocessors have two major drawbacks when they are used for real-time purposes. First, their complexity difficults the calculation of the WCET (worst case execution time). Second, power consumption requirements are much larger, which is a major concern in these systems. In this paper we propose a novel soft power-aware real-time scheduler for a state-of-the-art multicore multithreaded processor, which implements dynamic voltage scaling techniques. The proposed scheduler reduces the energy consumption while satisfying the constraints of soft real-time applications. Different scheduling alternatives have been evaluated, and experimental results show that using a fair scheduling policy, the proposed algorithm provides, on average, energy savings ranging from 34% to 74%.

The use of IT technologies plays an important role in the training of future engineers. In this paper, smartphones and multimedia technologies are proposed as an innovative way to tackle the formation of students, at different levels, in the Industrial Informatics (II) subject of the Industrial Electronics Engineering (IEE) degree. II instructs future Engineers in the design of IT systems to control industrial processes. In the first level, smartphones are used to display a web-based multimedia tool that is implemented to register the lecture explanations regarding the design of II systems, so as it facilitates student to guide him/her self in the learning process. In the second level, the smartphone is proposed as the control system of a medium size industrial process (e.g., water tank). Since II uses a problem-based learning methodology (miniproject) to instruct the design of II systems, for each lecture, laboratory practices are tackled, and the solutions obtained are embedded in the smartphone to control the corresponding part of the miniproject. An application of the Smartphone multimedia tool is presented to show how students interact with the developed system. The successful evaluation of the proposed tools, by more than 900 IEE students during three years, is shown.