Hardware-in-the-loop simulation of DC motor as an instructional media for control system design and testing

Instructional media in control systems typically requires a real plant as an element to be controlled. However, this real plant, which is costly to be implemented, can be replaced by a virtual plant implemented in a computer and modelled in such a way that it resembles the behavior of a real plant. This kind of set-up is widely termed as hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation. HIL simulation is an alternative way to reduce the development cost. A virtual plant is easy to adjust to represent various plants or processes that are widely used in industry. This paper proposes a simple HIL simulation set-up designed as instructional media for design and testing a simple control system. The experimental result on DC motor control shows that HIL simulation dynamical response is similar to the real hardware response with a small average error on measured transient response, represented in 0.5 seconds difference in settling time and 7.43 difference in overshoot. This result shows the efficacy of our HIL simulation set-up.