In 1995, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the largest public research funding organization in Germany, decided to launch a priority program (Schw- punktprogramm in German) calledKondisk– Dynamics and Control of Systems with Mixed Continuous and Discrete Dynamics. Such a priority program is usually sponsored for six years and supports about twenty scientists at a time, in engineering andcomputersciencemostlyyoungresearchersworkingforadoctoraldegree. There is a yearly competition across all disciplines of arts and sciences for the funding of such programs, and the group of proposers was the happy winner of a slot in that year. The program started in 1996 after an open call for proposals; the successful projects were presented and re-evaluated periodically, and new projects could be submitted simultaneously. During the course of the focused research program, 25 different projects were funded in 19 participating university institutes, some of the projects were collaborative efforts of two groups with different backgrounds, mostly one from engineering and one from computer science. There were two main motivations for establishingKondisk. The rst was the fact that technical systems nowadays are composed of physical components with (mostly) continuous dynamics and computerized control systems where the reaction to discrete events plays a major role, implemented in Programmable Logic Contr- lers (PLCs), Distributed Control Systems (DCSs) or real-time computer systems.

Introduction to Discrete Event Systems is a comprehensive introduction to the field of discrete event systems, offering a breadth of coverage that makes the material accessible to readers of varied backgrounds. The book emphasizes a unified modeling framework that transcends specific application areas, linking the following topics in a coherent manner: language and automata theory, supervisory control, Petri net theory, Markov chains and queuing theory, discrete-event simulation, and concurrent estimation techniques. This edition includes recent research results pertaining to the diagnosis of discrete event systems, decentralized supervisory control, and interval-based timed automata and hybrid automata models.

"Hybrid systems are networks of interacting digital and analog devices. Control systems for inherently unstable aircraft and computer aided manufacturing are typical applications for hybrid systems, but due to the rapid development of processor and circuit technology modern cars and consumer electronics use software to control physical processes. The identifying characteristic of hybrid systems is that they incorporate both continuous components governed by differential equations and also digital components - digital computers, sensors, and actuators controlled by programs. This volume of invited refereed papers is inspired by a workshop on the Theory of Hybrid Systems, held at the Technical University, Lyngby, Denmark, in October 1992, and by a prior Hybrid Systems Workshop, held at Cornell University, USA, in June 1991, organized by R.L. Grossman and A. Nerode. Some papers are the final versions of papers presented at these workshops and some are invited papers from other researchers who were not able to attend these workshops."--PUBLISHER'S WEBSITE.

This book is about dynamical systems that are "hybrid" in the sense that they contain both continuous and discrete state variables. Recently there has been increased research interest in the study of the interaction between discrete and continuous dynamics. The present volume provides a first attempt in book form to bring together concepts and methods dealing with hybrid systems from various areas, and to look at these from a unified perspective. The authors have chosen a mode of exposition that is largely based on illustrative examples rather than on the abstract theorem-proof format because the systematic study of hybrid systems is still in its infancy. The examples are taken from many different application areas, ranging from power converters to communication protocols and from chaos to mathematical finance. Subjects covered include the following: definition of hybrid systems; description formats; existence and uniqueness of solutions; special subclasses (variable-structure systems, complementarity systems); reachability and verification; stability and stabilizability; control design methods. The book will be of interest to scientists from a wide range of disciplines including: computer science, control theory, dynamical system theory, systems modeling and simulation, and operations research.

Control of Discrete-event Systems provides a survey of the most important topics in the discrete-event systems theory with particular focus on finite-state automata, Petri nets and max-plus algebra. Coverage ranges from introductory material on the basic notions and definitions of discrete-event systems to more recent results. Special attention is given to results on supervisory control, state estimation and fault diagnosis of both centralized and distributed/decentralized systems developed in the framework of the Distributed Supervisory Control of Large Plants (DISC) project. Later parts of the text are devoted to the study of congested systems though fluidization, an over approximation allowing a much more efficient study of observation and control problems of timed Petri nets. Finally, the max-plus algebraic approach to the analysis and control of choice-free systems is also considered. Control of Discrete-event Systems provides an introduction to discrete-event systems for readers that are not familiar with this class of systems, but also provides an introduction to research problems and open issues of current interest to readers already familiar with them. Most of the material in this book has been presented during a Ph.D. school held in Cagliari, Italy, in June 2011.

This book documents the scientific outcome of the Third International Workshop on Hybrid Systems, held in Ithaca, NY, USA, in October 1994. It presents a selection of carefully reviewed and revised full papers chosen from the workshop contribution and is the successor to LNCS 736, the seminal "Hybrid Systems" volume edited by Grossman, Nerode, Ravn, and Rischel. Hybrid systems are models for networks of digital and continuous devices, in which digital control programs sense and supervise continuous and discrete plants governed by differential or difference equations. The investigation of hybrid systems is creating a new and fascinating discipline bridging mathematics, computer science, and control engineering.

Sets out core theory and reviews new methods and applications to show how hybrid systems can be modelled and understood.