In support of cost reduction initiatives, a tool is needed to quantify the benefit of any proposed technology development improvement to a complex construction. With this aim in mind, major construction projects are embarked on developing computer based simulation models of the construction process, with the ability to incorporate proposed technology improvements to quantify the cost benefit.

As any complex construction process comprises a series of discrete operations or events with probabilistic durations the logical approach was to employ WITNESS, a general-purpose discrete event simulation package to model the process.