566 Book reviews / Automatica 38 (2002) 563567

An introduction to hybrid dynamical systems

A. van der Schaft, and H. Schumacher; LNCIS 251,
Springer, Berlin, 2000, ISBN 1-85233-233-6
In systems and control theory a system is said to be
hybrid when its state has continuous and discrete com-
ponents which interact via the systems dynamics. As a
result, the hybrid state of such a system evolves both
smoothly in continuous time and undergoes discontinu-
ous changes in discrete time, that is to say, at some count-
able set of time instants (which may be determined by
the system state and the control input).
Hybrid systems appear in a vast range of settings.
A list of domains where one would nd systems with
hybrid features would arguably include at least chem-
ical engineering, aerospace, air trac control, auto-
motive engineering and robotics. In part this is due
to the widespread use of computers for the regula-
tion of physical systems with continuous dynamics.
Consequently, as observed by van der Schaft and
Schumacher, hybrid systems arise in various guises
in systems and control theory, computer science and
system simulation. One may add that there are also
many examples of hybrid systems to be found in nat-
ural settings; consider, for instance, systems exhibit-
ing hysteresis, state phase changes (e.g. the states of
water) and systems possessing local, but not global,
stability.
The book by van der Schaft and Schumacher is a
welcome introduction to this rapidly developing area.
The six chapters are entitled respectively: Modelling
of Hybrid Systems, Examples of Hybrid Dynamical
Systems, Variable-structure Systems, Complimentarity
Systems, Analysis of Hybrid Systems, Hybrid Control
Design.
Chapter 1, Modelling of Hybrid Systems, contains
a presentation of the now standard hybrid system (or
automaton) model which has continuous states (more
precisely, state components) and discrete locations (i.e.
discrete state components), invariants (i.e constraints
which must be satised by a continuous state in a given
location) and guards and jumps. Uncontrolled jumps
are discontinuous changes in the continuous state or the
location, or both, which must occur when a guard set
has been entered and controlled jumps are those which
may be chosen to occur in a guard set. While the sys-
tem is in a specic location the continuous state evolves
according to a corresponding dierential equation with
control inputs. The instants at which jumps occur are
called event times and they are carefully discussed in
the hybrid systems setting specied in the rst chap-
ter; in particular, the issue of accumulation points of
switching times, the so-called Zeno times, arises in the
description of possible hybrid system behaviours. The
authors do not give general existence, uniqueness and
continuity theorems for hybrid system trajectories (also
called executions in the hybrid system literature) and
correspondingly the geometric and analytic hypothe-
ses which would be required for such an analysis are
omitted.
The authors also give an alternative formulation of
hybrid systems which involves the concatenation of
event-ow formulas. Here the ow formulas describe
the evolution of subsets of the continuous state compo-
nents in various locations and the event formulas specify
locally the invariants, guards and associated jump transi-
tions. An objective of this is to facilitate the specication
of the overall system in terms of the behaviour of the
individual system modules (potentially very large in
number) and to treat the interlinking of the modules via
communicating variables in a manner analogous to the
construction of the synchronous product of automata.
Chapter 2, Examples of Hybrid Dynamical Systems,
contains a very useful set of basic examples; specically,
the authors describe systems exhibiting hysteresis and
the various bouncing ball, heater-thermostat, water-level
monitor, controlled rail-road crossing, power converter
and constrained pendulum systems and, nally, a form
of the Van der Pol oscillator. In particular, the monitor
and rail-road examples are presented via the event-ow
formalism for each of the components of the system.
However, it is not evident that this leads to more com-
prehensible descriptions than the standard hybrid system
specication (via the continuous dynamics in each lo-
cation with the system of guards and jumps) which are
straightforward to formulate in both of the cases under
consideration.
Chapter 3, Variable-structure Systems, relates the sys-
tem descriptions introduced in the text to variable struc-
ture systems and essentially generalizes Fillipov solutions
within the hybrid systems framework.
Chapter 4, Complimentarity Systems, deals with a
topic to which the second author and his co-workers have
made signicant contributions; this is the class of
systems for which there is a complementarity pair-
ing between inputs u
i
and outputs y
i
, for each i,
such that both are non-negative and at least one
is zero. (There is also a lexicographical generaliza-
tion of this notion.) The signicance of this class
of models is established via examples including
mechanics and economics; subject to reasonable condi-
tions, theorems are given asserting the well-posedness
of linear complementary systems (which means here
existence and uniqueness of executions up to Zeno
times).
Chapter 5, Analysis of Hybrid Systems, briey dis-
cusses the question of the stability of hybrid systems
and the occurrence of chaotic phenomena. Chapter 6,
Hybrid Control Design, introduces the issues of stabi-
lization by switching and set point regulation for hybrid
systems.
Book reviews / Automatica 38 (2002) 563567 567
Many issues are not addressed in this book, such as
general well posedness theorems, the general methods
which have appeared for analysing the stability of hy-
brid systems (including Lie algebra techniques) and, in
particular, the versions of the Maximum Principle and
Dynamic Programming theorems which have been ob-
tained for the optimal control of hybrid systems. Also,
methodologies developed in the computer science and
simulation domains are only briey described. However,
the decision to give a limited presentation of the subject
which omitted the many technicalities arising in further
developments was certainly a sound one. The result is
that An Introduction to Hybrid Dynamical Systems is
a very accessible and well written basic introduction to a
rapidly moving eld. Furthermore the spirit of the subject
comes across clearly and the bibliography is extensive.
In conclusion, I denitely recommend this volume to all
those interested in hybrid system theory.
PII: S0005- 1098( 01)00238- 2
Peter E. Caines
Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept.,
McConnell Engineering Building 512,
3480 University, Montreal, QC, Canada
E-mail address: peterc@cim.mcgill.ca
About the reviewer
Peter E. Caines received the BA degree in Mathematics from
Oxford University in 1967 and the DIC and Ph.D. degrees in
Systems and Control from the Imperial College of Science and
Technology, London, in 1970. Since 1980 he has been with the De-
partment of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University,
Montreal. Peter Caines is the author or coauthor of more than two
hundred journal and conference papers on systems and control theory
and is the author of Linear Stochastic Systems published by John
Wiley in 1988; he is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Canadian Institute
for Advanced Research. Peter Caines has been a visiting researcher
and professor at several institutions; most recently, in 2000, he was
a William Mong Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hong
Kong and in 2001 a Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Technion,
Israel. His research interests lie in the areas of stochastic systems
and hierarchical, hybrid and discrete event systems.