This paper proposes a project to teach in a practical way several key factors of the Industry 4.0 technologies for electrical engineering students and teachers. The key factors are cibersecurity in industrial networks, industrial SCADA protocols and remote maintenance. Remote access to industrial networks is one of the contributions that Industry 4.0 has popularized because it makes industrial networks reachable using the public Internet. Remote maintenance is one of the great beneficiaries of this functionality. However, this access increases the security risks because a new and important vulnerability is opened by the access possibility from any computer connected to the Internet. To address this challenge, engineering students have to deal with industrial protocols topics, cibersecurity topics and control topics. This work presents an educational project to actively implement an atractive solution for remote access in industrial networks using open-source solutions. The selected open source solutions are the industrial telemetry protocol MQTT in the exchange of access control commands between the involved devices, the openvpn and ssh as a well-known VPN open-source product used for the remote access itself, the NodeRED platform as control dashboard and the IEC62443 industrial cybersecurity standard in order to monitor and audit the effectiveness of the project.

The paper presents the planned activities of the Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education for development and delivery of innovative curricula in maintenance engineering. The SM-TMC (Southern Mediterranean Maintenance Centre of Excellence) project, led by the University of Sfax, establishes, among others, a framework for Higher Education in Maintenance Engineering to equip students with competences in Industry, Informatics and Communications to lead generic maintenance skills and, in particular, Maintenance 4.0. The project started with a needs analysis survey involving higher education institutions and many industry stakeholders in Tunisia to analyse the status of educational programmes on maintenance engineering education. Issues relating to curriculum development were identified, such as the increasing needs in training teachers with a high degree of specialised knowledge and skills to carry out a creative and interdisciplinary maintenance engineering curriculum. In addition, universities do not maintain close links with industry to boost the practical competence of their graduates. To address the problems and challenges identified, universities and companies from Tunisia, France, Portugal, Romania, and Spain are sharing human and technological resources and infrastructures to design new curricula, based on the European Credit Transfer System, to be used in the partners’ educational programmes in maintenance engineering. The project is in the pilot testing phase of the innovative curricula.

This paper introduces a simple production and maintenance topology based on the Industry 4.0 principles. The paper defines the parts of the topology, hardware, software and communication protocols, and suggest the use of several low cost devices and open source software solutions. The whole solution is featured as a testbed for educational purposes, and presents the most important parts of the Maintenance 4.0 paradigm based on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). An use case is presented by using several ESP8266 devices as sensors, a data gateway implemented in a Raspberry Pi computer and the MQTT communication protocol to communicate with the edge and cloud servers.

One of the levels of the SM-TMC (South Mediterranean Tunisian Maintenance Centre of Excellence) project, led by the University of Sfax, is to establish a frame for Higher Education in Maintenance Engineering in order to give the students skills in Industrial Engineering, Informatics and Communications Engineering to lead in generic maintenance skills and particularly in Maintenance 4.0. Therefore, this work presents the core lines for a “PBL strategy for learning Maintenance and Manufacturing Engineering.” The main objective of the present study is to show new trending in the teaching-learning process of manufacturing and maintenance by using the method of analysis of the problem, solution design, development, and manufacture of product/system, and analyze all the problems and factors of influence maintenance. The main factors that influence in the learning process such as project evaluation criteria, creativity, design difficulties, manufacturing difficulties, and the approach from design to the manufactured product taking account the maintenance methodology have been measured qualitatively.