ABSTRACT
Manufacturing systems can be naturally viewed as discrete event systems (DESs). This chapter discusses the basic concepts, properties and theoretical results of autonomous and timed Continuous Petri Nets (TCPN), as well as steady state and dynamic control with classical discrete models. It presents some important concepts and properties about Continuous Petri Nets (CPN), both for the autonomous model and the timed model. Without time interpretation, the autonomous model can be used to analyse some behavioural properties, like boundedness, deadlock-freeness (DF) and, liveness. CPNs are relaxations of discrete Petri Nets (PN), but at the same time, they are also continuous-state technically, hybrid systems. Then, it is reasonable to consider the following two different approaches related to the control: the extension of control techniques used in discrete PN, such as the supervisory control theory, and the extension of control techniques developed for classical continuous-state systems.
