This volume consists of refereed papers related to the Fourth International Conference on Hybrid Systems held in Ithaca, NY, on October 12-14, 1996. The previous meetings (both workshops and conferences) were held in Ithaca, NY, Lyngby, DK, and New Brunswick, NJ.
Hybrid systems research is devoted to modeling, design and validation of interacting systems of continuous processes (plants) and computer programs (control automata). Hybrid systems theory hopes to offer a logical, mathematical, and computational framework for understanding and designing complex heterogeneous systems. We hope that, in the future, hybrid systems will form a modeling and software tool environment for many areas, including distributed autonomous control, management, synchronization, discrete event systems, fuzzy control, rule-based systems, and real-time systems.