Petri net as a formalism to assist process improvement in the construction industry

One major reason that hinders the implementation of process improvement principles in the construction industry is the lack of a powerful formalism to model and analyze the existing and new workflow processes. This paper proposes a framework which is based on the use of Petri nets for modeling and analyzing workflow processes in construction. The paper starts with an overview of current developments in the Petri nets theory. The paper then presents an example to demonstrate how to use the Petri net based framework to assist important steps of process improvement.