Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

The main goal of this paper is to derive sufficient conditions for the existence of an optimal control strategy for the long run average continuous control problem of piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMP's) taking values in a general Borel space and with compact action space depending on the state variable. In order to do that we apply the so-called vanishing discount approach to obtain a solution to an average cost optimality inequality associated to the long run average cost problem. Our main assumptions are written in terms of some integro-differential inequalities related to the so-called expected growth condition, and geometric convergence of the post-jump location kernel associated to the PDMP.