Virtual Laboratory of a Spider Crane: an implementation based on an interoperability protocol

The process of building remote or virtual laboratories to be deployed via Internet usually involves communication between different software tools. Very often, there is a separation between the software which interfaces with the model or real system, and the software responsible of providing the student with an interactive and visual representation of the data provided by the engineering system. Abstracting the way these two elements communicate with each other from the particular implementation, the requirements are frequently the same: connection and session control, data transmission control, user interaction handling, etc., which have been encapsulated into an standard interoperability protocol to remotely interoperate any kind of engineering software. This work describes a virtual lab of an Spider Crane system based on that protocol that allows, in this case of use, to interconnect an engineering model created with an engineering software (MATLAB/Simulink), with and interactive graphical interface designed with a specialized software tool (EjsS).