Among the reasons that are avoiding the compliance of the European sustainable growth objectives and provoking the unemployment situation in Europe are the deficits in qualified and skilled graduates and professionals. As an instrument against this situation, Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) in Sweden launched the Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality, VISIR, at end of 2006. VISIR is a remote laboratory for wiring and measuring electronics circuits on a breadboard remotely. VISIR allows realizing real measurement on physical equipment, which is not possible to achieve using simulation software. A brief description of VISIR project was earlier presented, and a good comparison with other similar system. So far, several universities have already implemented VISIR after BTH, and the different VISIR implementations have provoked a considerable impact in different grades and masters, related with engineering education, in these universities.As a real laboratory, VISIR has some limitations, as the mounting components on the relay switching matrix that is limited due to the limited number of nodes and component boards. PILAR project proposes a solution that aims to interconnect all VISIR systems, with each other in order to create a grid laboratory shared and accessed by all the participants, expanding and empowering existing systems to a new level of service and capacity. This will allow expanding the application range: each university may install certain circuits on its own VISIR and utilize another type of circuits installed on a VISIR of other universities and viceversa. The project will then provide: 1. A web-based federation of VISIR laboratories and includes a free-access repository for sharing learning resources. Members of this cloud will be the VISIR community partners. 2. The VISIR federation will offer a number of remote labs in the form of services to teachers and students at schools and universities.3. A teacher may reserve any workbench within the cloud for a particular time period. 4. It would also be possible for organization without VISIR to participate. However, they should be granted access to a particular workbench through prior negotiation with the providers.PILAR partnership is composed by 8 participants: BTH, the origin of VISIR; UNED, CUAS, IPP and UDEUSTO, four institutions with VISIR experiences, some of them shared, and finally, the IAOE (International Association of Online Engineering), an international non-profit organization with the objective of encouraging the wider development, distribution and application of Online Engineering. EVM has wide experience in EU projects and will colead and coordinate the dissemination activities. OMNIA is a multi-sector education provider that will colead the training activities. The main activities of the project will be:1. Building an integrated platform of all the remote VISIR implementations in CUAS, UNED, IPP, UDEUSTO and BTH, that will be accessed as a federation of remote labs2. Building of a set of remote VISIR electric and electronics practices, at different complexities, served as Internet services3. Creation of a set of formal documentation for entering PILAR for use of teachers and universities and schools managements4. Use of all these services in the partners institutions5. Offering to other institutions at local, regional, national and European levels.Management of the project will be performed in such a way to ensure active role of each of the partners: management plan with milestones and clear tasks for each partner. The coordinator will be responsible for the concrete executive actions and financial management. A person by partner will be responsible of carrying out the tasks, of taking decisions and performing proper actions on a local level to ensure smooth project development. There will be also a Project Management Centre (PMC) that will ensure permanent and effective communication between partners. Partners will have online access to the project via PMC. A short description of PILAR expected results are a well-defined set of open remote VISIR practices, available through Internet as a set of SLA-controlled services, for different subjects at grade and master university level and high school level, a deliverable document explaining the scope of the platform supporting the remote VISIR services, four multiplier events, associated with European conferences, in which the main results of each phase of the project will be shown and 4 learning and teaching activities, in which will show how to use, as students and as teachers, the remote VISIR services offered by the PILAR federation.
The context of the PILAR project in summary is the integration of the 5 main existing VISIR system in Europe in 2016 inside a new coordinated and Federated system, known as VISIR Federation, that allow an open access to the (new developed and old ones) hardware, software, courses, educational activities and document repository as well as the organization andmanagement fo the VISIR Federation inside the IAoE Association organization. As final summary of the PILAR project and VISIR Federation we accomplished those main objectives pursued during the exploitation phase, • A reliable, highly available VISIR Federation, which integrates all the different VISIR resources, used at each of the VISIR providers. • VISIR Federation is completely opened to other partners in Europe, through easy gateways to the federation, allowing extending the capabilities of PILAR to much more interested educational institutions. • A much larger set of practices as from the past developments of VISIR systems. • Remote lab services are provided to students in all the partners' institutions and to anyone interested worldwide. The results added value at European Union level because the activities can not be attained in a single country. • These new VISIR Remote Laboratory Internet services are provided in a transparent way for teachers and students. • A much more efficient and effective use of VISIR resources. • The VISIR Federation provides the required infrastructure to teachers without having their own one in order to exploit Open Educational Resources based on VISIR Remote .Laboratories. • A federation web which will serve as a repository and as a mean of spreading the federation. • The VISIR Federation platform allows a much better control of the students' learning process when students use the VISIR Federation platform and Remote .Laboratories services. The project integrated 8 different complementary partners, including 5 Universities involved in the project (UNED, University fo Deusto, Porto Polytechnic Institute, BTH and CUAS) that have a mixed face-to-face and online, public and private orientation, with more than 25 years of activity in all of them, with an average of near 50 years of activity and in some cases reaching more than 100 years of activity. VET institution (OMNIA) bring a view of the vocational learning needs and of the practical works to be performed online and onsite. Finally, Management and Exploitation SME (EVM) and Institutional Association (IAoE) bring a detailed view of the needs of the exploitation of the project as well as the implications to be developed to increase the visibility and sustainability of the outcomes. Main activities developed follow two different phases on the project: 1. Pilot phase, to develop a new website and repository, a new courses area based on Moodle and a final evaluation of the activities developed during the pilot phase to improve the deployments and developments. 2. Exploitation phase to granted fully open access of the educational activities, repositories, courses and website, having a transparent access to the VISIR systems integrated in the PILAR platform and the final implementation of the VISIR Federation to allow the coordinating of future activities after the PILAR project end. http://pilar.ieec.uned.es/ Through this website we connect with the courses website, where based in Moodle the user/s can have access to all the educational activities. https://pilar.ieec.uned.es/moodle/ As a final website, we provide the multilingual website of the project with the products, newsletters, etc. http://www.ieec.uned.es/pilar-project/index.html?lng=en As final results of the project, we can remark the stability of the VISIR Federation to allow the future evolution and the worldwide integration fo the stakeholders, users, researchers, hardware, software and educational developers around the PILAR platform. All the reports of the project will be openly available after the review and final close the project, in the Beneficiary Project Details link of the European Union as well as inside the website and repository of the project. And as tangible system, PILAR platform allows the open access and use of the five integrated VISIR systems at any time and from anywhere with a transparent access to them, and selecting a wide variety of courses and educational activities to perform there. The impact of the PILAR developed system and the usability have been presented and used in several of the most important international events on the area of online engineering and engineering education like EDUNINE 2018, REV 2018, EDUCON 2018, TAEE 2018, TALE 2018, EDUNINE 2019, REV 2019, EDUCON 2019 and exp.at'19, from Latin America (Argentina and Peru) to Europe (Germany and Spain), Middle East (Arab Emirates) to Far Asia (India and Australia). The longer-term benefits are one of the main core activities inside the project. The agreement and level of integration fo the project partners are th