2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Abstract – Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) courses have been taught by many colleges and universities for many years due to PLCs’ wide application in industrial automation. A PLC system simulator was designed to help our students to practice their programming skills both on and off campus, especially during the COVID19 period due to no access or limited access to labs. The PLC system simulator consists of a soft PLC, a basic I/O device simulator (presented at ASEE 2024) and an elevator simulator. The simulator software should install on individual students’ own computers for off-campus use. In this paper, the design of the elevator simulator will be presented and also provided is how to teach the programming of the elevator based on automata or state machine method. The elevator simulator was designed to mimic our lab miniature four floor elevator, which has up and/or down call buttons on each floor, in-car floor call buttons, doors that open and close with bell and brake, half and full travel speed control. Object-oriented programming with formal model-based design methods were used to the elevator simulator design, which helps to achieve as much as possible of data abstraction and high time effectiveness in building the software. The designed simulator was used for the 4-floor elevator programming project and automata based programming method was taught in our fall 2021 online, fall 2022 to 2024 in-person class. Evaluation showed that the intended outcomes were achieved and the student performance was satisfactory.