Automation course for industrial engineers: An approach based on Petri Nets, software tools and laboratory experiments

Abstract

© 2014 TEMPUS Publications.This paper proposes a methodology for teaching industrial automation to Brazilian industrial engineering undergraduate students, based on analysing a computational solution associated with an integrated manufacturing laboratory. As a first approach an analytical analysis of the automated process is carried out. Then the manufacturing laboratory is combined with software tools, to provide the industrial engineering student with a powerful analysis for using these kinds of systems to improve product quality and production performance. For the computational analysis, we have inserted Petri Nets to evaluate the production system performance with a good acceptance from the students. This is the highlight of this work since using Petri Nets for Industrial Engineering undergraduate students is not a common approach. Finally, an assessment proved that such a strategy has been producing excellent learning results.