Modeling, simulation and control of event-driven operations in process systems

The automation of batch processes poses difficult issues because it is necessary to concurrently deal with continuous and discrete models. In this paper we present a Petri net based approach which does not employ a unified framework based on extended Petri nets. Indeed, we do not try to integrate the continuous aspect within the framework of Petri net theory. In contrast, we establish a cooperation and powerful interaction between the Petri net model of the discrete aspect of the batch system and the continuous model which is a set of differential algebraic equations. This approach has been tested in the food industry for the validation of scheduling policies and is currently been developed for supervisory control and reactive scheduling.