Process control engineering for computer science students

Since 1988 the staff of the Department of Automation - located at Vienna's University of Technology - is heavily involved into process control education for undergraduate computer science students. To give the students a first overview in the wide area of automation and process control engineering a course to be discussed in this paper, namely Process Automation, was split up into a lecture - designed and run by the department's head - and a practical - designed and run by the assistant professors. In a former paper Schmid et al. (1993) described the experiences regarding the first generation practical (1989-1993) and shortly pointed out the efforts, intensions and expectations underlying the "new" second generation practical starting in 1994. Now, after almost a three years' evaluation phase the current contents should be summarised. Due to limited course time the contents of the practical had to be restricted to topics of programming process interface hardware. For this purpose the authors developed more or less complex process models, which allow to teach the students how to solve typical problems in programming industrial I/O real-time applications. This paper will introduce the didactic aims, give a short overview about organization and rating criteria, present the new models, as well as show the hard- and software environment of the practical called Laborubung Prozessautomatisierung. Copyright (C) 1998 IFAC.