Engineering wins FUPRE’s maiden Nigeria Industrial Simulation Games

The Engineering Department has won the maiden edition of the Federal University of Petroleum Resources (FUPRE), Effurun, Delta State’s Industrial Games, which is a competition based computer simulation of the real world industrial work place.

The competition, the organisers told The Guardian, would boost Nigeria’s quest for well trained home-grown engineers and scientists to help drive the much waited national technological advancement.

According to the facilitators, the competition is based on the oil and gas industry, but any other industry could be modeled for it.At the maiden games, select students from FUPRE’s faculties of Engineering and Science competed for the laurels.

Declaring the competition open, the Vice Chancellor, Prof Ibhadode Akii, said it is a smart way to expose students to real life industrial workplace in a virtual environment. He added that FUPRE is always keen to explore new schemes that would improve the skill levels of students, hence the partnership with Total Automation Concept Ltd (TAC) to develop the software for the competition.

He said the university launched the industrial games project to help the engineering and science students strike a balance between education and entertainment with FUPRE selected to participate in the pilot phase.

Also speaking on the games, the chairman of the Industrial Games Project Committee, Dr. Anselm O. Amadi, said: “In the real world industries, there is usually a control room from where the active parts of the industry can be manipulated. The control room may contain buttons, switches, light bulbs, flow lines, regulators, etc. The behaviour of the physical system affects the corresponding controls in the control room and vice versa.

The appearance and behaviour of the control room in a typical working system is modeled by experts and software developed to produce a semblance of a control room on a computer screen. Using the software simulates the behaviour of the control room operator in a real environment.”

FUPRE’s Faculty of Engineering won the competition and the N70, 000 cash prize, while Master Emmanuel Lucky, a 200 level Chemical Engineering student, emerged best overall winner and went home with a laptop.