On Observability and Design of Observers inTimed Continuous Petri Net Systems

This paper is devoted both to the study of observability criteria and the design of observers in the continuous Petri net setting. The concept of structural observability, regarding the possibility of estimating the marking of places, i.e., the system state, for any speed of the transitions is introduced and studied for the subclass of join-free Petri nets (JF). For non-join-free Petri nets, conditions to compute suitable state estimates are established. The proposed observers are piecewise linear systems that assure the continuity of the estimate even when a switch occurs. The system simulation may allow us to estimate even the unobservable space of the net system during a given time period.