The operational objective of this project, which builds on a former Leonardo project (Advance), is to develop and to experiment a vocational training procedure aimed to improve the competences for the employees of all types of industrial enterprises in what concerns the maintenance and the control of industrial production units. This will lead towards an increase of productivity and competitiveness, optimisation of energy consumption and reduction of environmental wastes. The corresponding training is a technical one, therefore a dedicated pedagogical procedure is required in order to simulate the real processes and to ensure the full effectiveness. The methodology combines the technical training materials with a distance self-evaluation approach, a virtual production unit and a real production process, all being accessible as virtual instruments via Internet. The results envisaged by the project include: the training materials, the self-evaluation tools, the virtual production unit, the elements for control and diagnostics and the dissemination materials. These results are expected to have an impact on: the training of employees in the industrial sector, the adaptation of other training courses using the same platform, the training organisation in the field of automatic systems.