The plant contains all continuous-state subsystems of the hybrid control system, such as any conventional continuous-state controllers that may have been developed, a clock if time and synchronous operations are to be modeled, etc.. The controller is an event driven, asynchronous discrete event system (DES), described by a finite state automaton or an ordinary Petri net. The hybrid control system also contains an interface that provides the means for communication between the continuous-state plant and the DES controller. The interface receives information from the plant in the form of a measurement of a continuous variable z(t), such as the continuous state, and issues a sequence of symbols {z(i)} to the DES controller. It also receives a sequence of control symbols {r(i)} from the controller and issues (piecewise) continuous input commands r(t) to the plant.