Motivated by a real problem in steel production, we introduce and analyze a
general class of singularly perturbed linear hybrid systems with both switches
and impulses, in which the slow or fast nature of the variables can be
mode-dependent. This means that, at switching instants, some of the slow
variables can become fast and vice-versa. Firstly, we show that using a
mode-dependent variable reordering we can rewrite this class of systems in a
form in which the variables preserve their nature over time. Secondly, we
establish, through singular perturbation techniques, an upper bound on the
minimum dwell-time ensuring the overall system's stability. Remarkably, this
bound is the sum of two terms. The first term corresponds to an upper bound on
the minimum dwell-time ensuring the stability of the reduced order linear
hybrid system describing the slow dynamics. The order of magnitude of the
second term is determined by that of the parameter defining the ratio between
the two time-scales of the singularly perturbed system. We show that the
proposed framework can also take into account the change of dimension of the
state vector at switching instants. Numerical illustrations complete our study