Toward a general control design paradigm for hybrid systems: Ideas, concepts, and formulations

This paper sheds light on the concepts of decision making and optimal control in the supervisory control of hybrid systems. Here, “decision-making” is defined as “priority-setting,” meaning that we construct a priority mapping that is allowed to be defined from both policies and the system's physical limitations. At the run time, the supervisory control of any hybrid system results in a set of possible transitions for the current state from which one should be picked. However, the set may consist of more than one transition at the highest priority. In such a case, hybrid optimal control is defined to be applied. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to highlight these stages of specification to be implemented through a novel multi-layer framework for the execution and control of hybrid systems.