Hybrid systems are interacting networks of digital and continuous systems. - brid systems arise throughout business and industry in areas such as interactive distributed simulation, trac control, plant process control, military command and control, aircraft and robot design, and path planning. Three of the fun- mental problems that hybrid systems theory should address are: How to model physical and information systems as hybrid systems; how to verify that their - havior satis es program or performance specic ations; and how to extract from performancespeci cationsforanetworkofphysicalsystemsandtheirsimulation models digital control programs which will force the network to obey its perf- mance speci cation. This rapidly developing area is at the interface of control, engineeringandcomputer science. Methods under developmentareextensionsof thosefromdiverseareassuchasprogramveri cation, concurrentanddistributed processes, logic programming, logics of programs, discrete event simulation, c- culus of variations, optimization, di erential geometry, Lie algebras, automata theory, dynamical systems, etc. When the rst LNCS volume Hybrid Systems was published in 1993, the e ect was to focus the attention of researchers worldwide on developing theory andengineeringtoolsapplicabletohybridsystemsinwhichcontinuousprocesses interact with digital programs in real time. At the time of publication of this fth volume, there is general agreement that this is an important area in which mathematics, control engineering, and computer science can be fruitfully c- bined. There are now hybrid system sections in many engineering and computer scienceinternationalmeetings, hybridsystems researchgroupsin manyuniver- ties and industrial laboratories, and also other excellent series of hybrid systems conferenc

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference documentation of the Fourth International Conference on Hybrid Systems held in Ithaca, NY, USA, in October 1996. The volume presents 19 carefully revised full papers selected from numerous submissions. Hybrid systems research focuses on modeling, design, and validation of interacting systems (plants) and computer programs (control automata). This volume is devoted to hybrid systems models, formal verification, computer simulation, goal reachability, algorithms for extracting hybrid control programs, and application models for avionics, highway traffic control, and air traffic control.

This book documents the scientific outcome of the Third International Workshop on Hybrid Systems, held in Ithaca, NY, USA, in October 1994. It presents a selection of carefully reviewed and revised full papers chosen from the workshop contribution and is the successor to LNCS 736, the seminal "Hybrid Systems" volume edited by Grossman, Nerode, Ravn, and Rischel.
Hybrid systems are models for networks of digital and continuous devices, in which digital control programs sense and supervise continuous and discrete plants governed by differential or difference equations. The investigation of hybrid systems is creating a new and fascinating discipline bridging mathematics, computer science, and control engineering.