In 1988, Bertozzi extended the Smale-Birkhoff Homoclinic Theorem and the Melnikov method so they are applicable to heteroclinic bifurcations for smooth systems [10]. It is natural to ask if the transversal intersections of the perturbed stable and unstable manifolds of a heteroclinic orbit of PWS systems result in chaotic motions. Unfortunately, the Heteroclinic Theorem of Berttozzi [10] requires the corresponding Poincar´e map to be differentiable. Thus it can not be applied to PWS systems because this condition is not satisfied by most of the PWS systems. Nevertheless, the study of heteroclinic bifurcations in time-perturbed PWS systems has attracted more and more attentions. Heteroclinic bifurcations for models of periodically excited slender rigid blocks were studied in the works of Bruhn and Koch [11], Hogan [28], Lenci and Rega in [33]. In [23], Granados, Hogan and Seara presented the Melnikov method for heteroclinic and subharmonic bifurcations in a periodically excited piecewise planar Hamiltonian system with two zones. The Melnikov method for heteroclinic bifurcations of a planar PWS system with impacts and of a general planar PWS system with finitely many zones were developed in [34] and [42] respectively. Although not rigorously proved, numerical simulations on concrete examples given in these works suggest that chaotic behavior can be resulted from heteroclinic bifurcations in PWS systems.Recently, by applying the aforementioned functional analytic method developed by Battelli and Feˇckan in [4–8,19], Li and Du [35] studied the appearance of chaos in time-perturbed n-dimensional PWS systems with heteroclinic orbit. They derived a set of Melnikov type functions whose zeros correspond to the occurrence of chaos of the system. To reduce the complexity, they assumed that the switching manifolds are supersurfaces intersecting at a connected (n − 2)-dimensional submanifold, the unperturbed system has a hyperbolic saddle in each subregion and a heteroclinic orbit connecting those saddles that crosses every switching manifold transversally exactly once. However, in real applications, discontinuities of a PWS system may occur on more complicated sets and impacts may occur when the flow of the system reaches the switching manifolds. Thus it is necessary to extend the results obtained in [35] to systems with other types of switching manifolds and other types of PWS systems, for example, systems with impacts considered in [23,34].