Industrial Controls and Telematics Across Disciplines

Morgan Community College, Fort Morgan CO

Investigators

Abstract

Morgan Community College will develop an Industrial Controls and Telematics (ICT) certificate to provide access to high-tech and high-wage employment opportunities for a diverse rural region in Colorado. This will bring modern practices of telematics and industrial controls into the current precision agriculture and industrial maintenance technician programs. This will help meet local workforce needs in a rapidly emerging technology field. Often employees gain knowledge of ICT through on-the-job training, however, industry states that having this knowledge as employees on-board is imperative in today's technical fields. The ICT certificate will also add rigorous STEM content to courses in telematics. This will ensure a greater number of students are entering the high-performance workplace with enhanced STEM theoretical understanding, technical skills, and relevant competencies. Telematics data can be leveraged in an array of challenges particularly through remote and mobile equipment. Management and tracking of assets though telematics enables both remote monitoring and predictive maintenance. This capability is a hallmark of the computerization of manufacturing, also known as Industry 4.0. As smart machines and sensors are used for manufacturing and agricultural environments, processes will become more data-driven and data-enabled. This emerging field is projected to save industry up to 50% of maintenance costs by 2022 through the prevention of asset failure, improvement of asset performance, and lower downtime of automation and process machinery. Having employees with the knowledge of industrial controls, programmable logic controllers, principles of relay logic, workflows, automation systems, and the ability to troubleshoot will help industry minimize downtime and maximize returns. It will also address the gap of the expected annual growth rate of this emerging field by providing a knowledgeable and well-prepared workforce that will bring regional industry and agricultural partners up-to-date with current technology to be competitive in a rapidly evolving and technology-driven global economy. This project is funded by the Advanced Technological Education program that focuses on the education of technicians for the advanced-technology fields that drive the nation's economy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.