First-order hybrid Petri nets. An application to distributed manufacturing systems

In this paper we consider Hybrid Petri Nets (HPNs), a particular formalism that combines fluid and discrete event dynamics. We first provide a survey of the main HPN models that have been presented in the literature in the last decades. Then, we focus on a particular HPN model, namely the First-Order Hybrid Petri Net (FOHPN) model, whose continuous dynamics are piece-wise constant. Here the problem of designing an optimal controller simply requires solving on-line an appropriate linear integer programming problem. In this paper we show how FOHPNs can efficiently represent the concurrent activities of Distributed Manufacturing Systems (DMS), and some interesting optimization problems are also solved via numerical simulation.