Abstract-Enterprises are adopting the Internet of Things paradigm as a strategy to improve competitiveness. But enterprises also need to rely on their legacy systems, which are of vital importance to them and normally difficult to reconfigure or modify, their mere replacement being usually not affordable. These systems constitute, therefore, barriers to agility and competitiveness, raising the need to develop cost-effective ways for IoT adaptation. An approach for adapting legacy manufacturing systems into the IoT realm is proposed in this research. The methodology is twofold: an adaptation board is firstly designed to provide IoT connectivity, allowing to remotely invoke the "legacy" functionality as services. Then, the board itself can leverage the legacy system by developing additional functionalities inside it, as the update process is usually triggered by the need of new functionality from these systems. An experiment, which consists of adapting to IoT a small distribution line that is controlled by an aged Programmable Logic Controller, is developed to illustrate how straightforward, affordable and cost effective the adaptation approach is, allowing to holistically achieve a new system with more sophisticated functionality.

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Abstract-In this paper, a virtual PLC environment aiming at assisting automation teaching, learning and e-learning is proposed and discussed. The main contributions are a virtual PLC environment propped on a local and remote applications, along with the comparison of two teaching and learning methodologies, one local, while the other offers a remote interaction with the system. The proposed framework fits in the emerging technologies on the Internet of Everything, having the potential of promoting the integration and communication of virtual and real systems.

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