Grid Remote Laboratory Management System

Remote laboratories have become a useful educational tool. There is a common, though often not well-articulated, distinction between the remote laboratory that provides the experimental experience for students, and the supporting Remote Laboratory Management System (RLMS) that provides ancillary services such as access control and apparatus monitoring. Whereas some remote laboratories are developed specifically within the context of a given RLMS, many more have been developed as stand-alone experiments. This paper explores the challenges in integrating existing remote laboratories into a separate RLMS. A case study is described that makes use of Sahara - an evolving RLMS developed under the Australian Labshare project - describing its architecture, main features, capabilities, limitations and the future challenges. The paper then reports preliminary observations with regard to implementing Sahara within a European university (the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department of the Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED)) as part of a strategy of creating a grid RLMS for the pool of pre-existing remote laboratories used within the UNED education programs.