2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The number of positions in the operational technologies (OT) communications domain of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) organizations has been increasing worldwide in the last 5 years. There exists a skills gap in the current CPS workforce. That gap has reached a critical level, especially for skills in the communication domain of CPS organizations. The use of hands-on exercises is known to be a practice that helps alleviate skills gap in students and in trainees. Incorporating hands-on exercises in a degree program will mitigate skills gap in graduates. While the graduates can help fill increasingly vacant positions in the communications domain of CPS organizations, it is also important to provide continuing education resources for working professionals. One of our course design priorities is to maximize outreach to the CPS workforce and to minimize potential damage caused by another pandemic-like societal disruption. As such, facilitating equity of access to quality hands-on educational materials across both remote and onsite learners is one of our important objectives. We created lab exercises for enabling hands-on learning in a CPS communication systems course for on-campus and remote learners.

Our hands-on exercises include tutorials in the following topics: 1) unmanaged and managed switch-based communication networks; 2) telemetry, component configuration and actuation workflows for communication using multiple OT protocols operating over Ethernet and over serial connections; 3) cybersecurity of communication devices in a CPS organization e.g., configuring gateways; and 4) commissioning i.e., testing et validation of communication devices in a CPS organization. Our exercises work uniformly and seamlessly for both onsite and remote learners. Creating uniform, seamless materials for both onsite and remote students required exploration of secure, easy-to-use network schemes that meet the requirements of a university network security policies. We discuss the challenges faced in our exploration efforts. We present a case study where the described hands-on exercises are used in a joint listed senior/graduate level course at a public research university in the US. The case study course is cross listed for both Computer Science (CS) and Electrical Engineering (EE) majors. Our case study presents the implementation of hands-on exercises on the ISAAC (The Idaho CPS SCADA Cybersecurity Testbed) power system as a use case. We present results of an informal user experience survey for the students who performed our hands-on exercises.