Remote laboratories have been introduced during the last few decades into engineering education processes as well as integrated within e-learning frameworks offered to engineering and science students. Remote laboratories are also being used to support life-long learning and student's autonomous learning activities. In this paper, after a brief overview of state-of-the-art technologies in the development of remote laboratories and presentation of recent and interesting examples of remote laboratories in several areas related with industrial electronics education, some current trends and challenges are also identified and discussed.

Petri nets are a well-known formalism widely used in different application areas. Yet, the lack of adequate tools that can be integrated within engineering development frameworks are one major drawback. This paper identifies and justifies the characteristics of one class of Petri nets targeted for the modelling of automation systems and (networked) embedded systems, named as input-output Petri net (IOPT), and its representation using the Petri net markup language (PNML). The paper also presents a set of associated tools under development. This Petri net class, defined on top of the well-known place-transition Petri nets, is the common link across a set of tools under development, including a graphical editor, a state-space analyser for the verification of properties, conflict resolution through automatic arbiter generation, automatic code generators, simulator, among others. In this sense, the main goal of the proposed Petri net class and associated tools is to support the entire system development flow, from specification to implementation.

Along Petri nets' history, numerous approaches have been proposed that try to manage model size through the introduction of structuring mechanisms allowing hierarchical representations and model composability. This paper proposes a classification system for Petri nets' structuring mechanisms and discusses each one of them. These include node fusion, node vectors, high-level nets, and object-oriented inspired Petri nets extensions, among others. One running example is used emphasizing the application of the presented mechanisms to specific areas, namely to automation systems modeling, and software engineering, where object-oriented modeling plays a major role.

A distributed, agent-based intelligent system models and simulates a smart grid using physical players and computationally simulated agents. The proposed system can assess the impact of demand response programs.

Smart grids concept benefits and leverage distributed management systems while allowing its players to actively participate in the smart grid. This paper merges the concepts of microgrid and transactive energy. The proposed model is tested in an office building with multiple tenants. An agent-based platform, running in single-board computers, for microgrid intelligent management with a peer-to-peer energy transaction model is proposed in this paper. This paper describes the peer-to-peer transaction auction model and the deployment of the platform in an office building. The results regard a one-week period where the use of peer-to-peer transactions is compared with a scenario where no transactions among agents are performed. The results are promising, showing the energy price inside the microgrid dropping for the majority of players/agents. The presented work demonstrates how smart grid players can decrease their energy costs using simple approaches that do not require load shifting, consumption optimization nor the acquisition of new equipment.

A Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS) is a novel paradigm of cyber-physical and cyber-social systems with a highly inhomogeneous and distributed nature integrating dynamic stochastic hybrid systems including computation, communication, sensing and actuation, and social systems.Their usage can be traced to homes such as smart homes, manufacturers in Industry 5.0, critical infrastructures, smart cities, medicines, healthcare systems, and many other examples. They can simplify and speed up tasks and provide a higher level of control and accessibility. In this study, we provide a systematic review of the definition of CPSS,and an uniform definition of CPSS. We propose a novel taxonomy to define CPSS to help future researches and system designing. The CPSS taxonomy aims to provide a comprehensive and understating of CPSS characteristics and aspects from system-to-system point of view. Furthermore, we discuss about social integration in CPSS and their relationships with CPS. We mention issues and opportunities in CPSS in the designing and implementing phases.