Comparison of the effectiveness of methods to increase the throughput of experimental equipment with remote access
Keywords:
experimental equipment with remote access, multi-user distributed measuring-control system, automation of educational and scientific experimental studies, throughput, multi-user access, digital educational environment, queuing system.Abstract
Introduction: The rapid development of the information society is expressed in the emergence of new models of economic activity, forms of providing educational and social services, scientific activities, etc. оn the basis of constantly improving digital technologies. This, in turn, leads to the emergence of new requirements for knowledge and skills of modern engineers whose preparation is based on various laboratory studies. The modern form of realization of such researches is multi-user remote access from digital educational environment to specialized experimental equipment (laboratory installations/stands/layouts), providing efficient use of this equipment. Purpose: Comparative analysis of methods for increasing the throughput of experimental equipment with multi-user remote access. Methods: Management of user request service procedure based on scheduling algorithms which take into account the functional and parametric content of the processed requests (configuration settings of the object of study, type of measurements taken, parameters of test signals, etc.), as well as the features of the hardware construction. Results: On the basis of the proposed approach for multi-user distributed measuring-control systems the following methods are developed: 1. A method of minimizing control operations which determines the sequence of retrieving jobs from the queue in accordance with the minimum of total control time for all the requests currently in the queue. 2. A method of temporary division of multiple measurements, providing distribution of operations of statistical processing of measurement results between the software on a measuring-control computer and the user terminal. 3. A method of parallelizing functional operations which reduces the time to service the requests by programmatically splitting and concurrently performing the management and measuring operations for queued queries related to different control objects. A comparative analysis of the applied approaches has shown that the most effective, in terms of the cost of equipping a single user workplace, are methods based on managing the process of servicing the user requests. Practical relevance: The developed methods have made it possible to create a number of samples of multi-user distributed measuring-control systems for the automation of educational and scientific experimental researches with a 16–40% lower cost of equipping a workplace and with throughput of 30–50 concurrent users on the basis of one set of specialized experimental equipment.