ANALYSIS OF TIMED PETRI NETS FOR REACHABILITY IN CONSTRUCTION APPLICATIONS

Petri nets have been used for many years to model complex processes. Examples are software design, workflow management, data analysis, concurrent programming, reliability engineering, real-time computing systems, operating systems, distributed systems. and biological processes. Timed petri nets enable the study of timed process reachability, i.e. can a certain state in the process be reached, given an initial state of TPN representing a given process. This paper shows how the reachability of TPN can be utilized to analyze several aspects of construction projects. TPN are introduced and contrasted to Activity Cycle Diagrams and are also formalized to allow for the reachability problem to be assessed. the benefits and limitations of the analysis are presented through the classic earth-moving problem.