Control of continuous Petri nets using ON/OFF based method

Continuous Petri Nets (CPN) can be used to approximate classical discrete Petri nets which suffer from the state explosion problem. In this paper we focus on the control of timed CPN (TCPN), aiming to drive the system from an initial state to a desired final one. This problem is similar to the set-point control problem in a general continuous-state system. In a previous work, a simple and efficient ON/OFF controller was proposed for structurally persistent nets, and it is proved to be minimum-time. In this work the ON/OFF controller is extended to general TCPN, but in this case, the minimum-time evolution is not guaranteed. Two extensions are proposed, both of them are based on the ON/OFF strategy. Some comparisons of different control methods are given in terms of their applications to an assembly system.