Modeling hybrid systems with petri nets

The behavior of a hybrid system is a mixture of continuous behavior and discrete event behavior. The Simulink/Stateflow toolset is a widely used industrial tool to design and validate hybrid control systems using numerical simulation methods for the continuous parts and an executable Stateflow (combination of Statecharts and Flowcharts) for the discrete event parts. On the other hand, Colored Petri Nets (CPN) is a well-known formalism for modeling behavior of discrete event systems. In this paper, we show how the CPN formalism can be used to model a hybrid system. Then we consider the special case of Simulink/Stateflow models and show how they can be expressed in CPN.