Zhang H., De Saporta B., Dufour F., Deleuze G., 2013, Dynamic Reliability by Using Simulink and Stateflow, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 33, 529-534.
The safety of high criticity industrial systems relies heavily on relatively complex programmed systems. Due to the complexity of the interactions between physical processes and their control, classical methodologies such as even-trees/fault-trees or Petri nets may not represent adequately the dynamic interactions existing between the physical processes (modeled by continuous variables) and the functional and dysfunctional behavior of its components (modeled by discrete variables). These hybrid systems can be mathematically modeled by piecewise deterministic Markov processes. To illustrate our approach, we present an academic problem. It has already been extensively studied in the literature under the name “heated hold-up tank” (Marseguerra, 1994; Marseguerra et al., 1995; Zhang et al., 2009).
