TITLE:
Representing the Knowledge of Public Construction Project Cost Estimator by Using Rule-Based Method
AUTHORS:
Abelrahman Osman Elfaki, Saleh Alatawi
KEYWORDS:
Construction Management, Construction Cost Estimation, Rule-Based System
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Building Construction and Planning Research,
Vol.3 No.4,
December
11,
2015
ABSTRACT: Despite the presence of various construction project cost estimate softwares, human experience
and knowledge cannot be disregarded. This fact has been proven in practice, where the success of
construction cost estimate process is mainly based on knowledge of human estimator. The main
question concerns what human knowledge determines the success of the construction cost estimation
process. To address this question we have applied Delphi technique and the output is eleven
factors that are enough to precisely represent construction cost estimator knowledge. Then
we have used First Order Logic (FOL) to represent these factors in terms of predicates and rules.
These FOL rules could be used for evaluating construction cost estimator knowledge in five classes:
fail, pass, acceptable, good, and very good. As a validation process we have done experiments using
history data and the results have proved the accuracy of our proposed method.