Timed Petri Nets in Hybrid Systems: Stability and Supervisory Control

In this paper, timed Petri nets are used to model and control hybrid systems. Petri nets are used instead of finite automata primarily because of the advantages they offer in dealing with concurrency and complexity issues. A brief overview of existing results on hybrid systems that are based on Petri nets is first presented. A class of timed Petri nets named programmable timed Petri nets (PTPN) is then used to model hybrid systems. Using the PTPN, the stability and supervisory control of hybrid systems are addressed and efficient algorithms are introduced. In particular, we present sufficient conditions for the uniform ultimate boundness of hybrid systems composed of multiple linear time invariant plants which are switched between using a logical rule described by a Petri net. This paper also examines the supervisory control of a hybrid system in which the continuous state is transfered to a region of the state space in a way that respects safety specifications on the plant’s discrete and continuous dynamics. ∗This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant ECS95-31485. †The first author gratefully acknowledges the fellowship of the Center of Applied Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame for the academic year 1997-98.