Flowgraph models: a Bayesian case study in construction engineering

Flowgraph models are useful in a wide variety of systems engineering and survival analysis problems. They are especially useful for analyzing time-to-event data and constructing corresponding Bayes predictive distributions. When a continuous time semi-Markov process defines transition times between a finite number of states and interest focuses on estimating densities, survival/reliability and hazard functions, or predictive distributions, flowgraph models provide a way of presenting the model and an associated method for data analysis. The method is illustrated using data from a construction engineering project.