Contextual Information Requirements of Cost Estimators from Past Construction Projects

Date

2009-09-01

Author

Kiziltas, Semiha
Akinci, Burcu

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

183
views

0
downloads

Past project data sources provide key information for construction cost estimators. Previous research studies show that relying only on one's own experience during estimation results in estimators' bias. Having and referring to historical databases, containing objective information on what happened in past projects, are essential for reducing estimators' biases. The first step toward development of useful project history databases is to understand what information estimators require from past projects. The research described in this paper targets estimators' information needs identified through interviews, brainstorming sessions, task analyses, and card games conducted with estimators with different experience levels and specialized in heavy/civil and commercial construction projects, and exploration of historical and standard databases available in companies to determine what is being currently represented. Findings show that estimators need contextual information, depicting the conditions under which specific production rates were achieved, so that they can identify which production rate would be more realistic to use during the production rate estimation of an activity in a new bid. Comparison of the contextual information needs identified in this research with information items available in historical data sources (such as company cost reports, RSMeans, previous studies) highlighted some gaps and important opportunities for improvements in those sources. The identified contextual information items are significant for practitioners in developing ways to augment their existing project history databases to make them more beneficial for estimators.

Subject Keywords

Strategy and Management, Industrial relations, Civil and Structural Engineering, Building and Construction

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/64751

Journal

JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1061/(asce)co.1943-7862.0000053

Collections

Department of Civil Engineering, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Context-Dependent Construction Conflict Management Performance Analysis Based on Competency Theory Altuncan, Izel Unsal; Tanyer, Ali Murat (American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2018-12-01) Construction project environments are shaped by uncertainty and complexity; therefore, conflict situations that lead to time and cost overruns are rather frequent. However, no empirical studies conducted so far have analyzed conflict management performances of individuals on a context-dependent basis. This paper proposes a performance assessment methodology for conflict management that integrates two different approaches from other disciplines: hypothetical situations and competency theory. The approach ana...
Sensing and Field Data Capture for Construction and Facility Operations Taneja, Saurabh; akinci, burcu; garrett, james; soibelman, lucio; berges, mario; Atasoy Özcan, Güzide; LIU, XEUONG; SHAHANDASHTI, SM; ANIL, BURAK; ERGEN PEHLEVAN, ESİN; pradhan, anu; tang, pingbo (American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2011-10-01) Collection of accurate, complete, and reliable field data is not only essential for active management of construction projects involving various tasks, such as material tracking, progress monitoring, and quality assurance, but also for facility and infrastructure management during the service lives of facilities and infrastructure systems. Limitations of current manual data collection approaches in terms of speed, completeness, and accuracy render these approaches ineffective for decision support in highly ...
Integrated Approach to Overcome Shortcomings in Current Delay Analysis Practices Birgönül, Mustafa Talat; Dikmen Toker, İrem (American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2015-04-01) Many factors, such as unforeseeable events, managerial and financial problems of contractors, insufficient technical capacity of site teams of contractors or Consultants, and so on, may lead to delays in construction projects. Proper analysis of compensability and quantum of a delay event is of prime importance. Any delay analysis application can be considered as a result of the combination of contract documents, scheduler, record-keeping mechanism at the site, communication among project participants, dela...
Activity Uncrashing Heuristic with Noncritical Activity Rescheduling Method for the Discrete Time-Cost Trade-Off Problem Sönmez, Rifat; Atan, Tankut (American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2020-08-01) Despite intensive research efforts that have been devoted to discrete time-cost optimization of construction projects, the current methods have very limited capabilities for solving the problem for real-life-sized projects. This study presents a new activity uncrashing heuristic with noncritical activity rescheduling method to narrow the gap between the research and practice for time-cost optimization. The uncrashing heuristic searches for new solutions by uncrashing the critical activities with the highest...
Critical Sequence Crashing Heuristic for Resource-Constrained Discrete Time-Cost Trade-Off Problem Sönmez, Rifat; Uysal, Furkan (American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2016-03-01) Despite the importance of project deadlines and resource constraints in construction scheduling, very little success has been achieved in solving the resource-constrained discrete time-cost trade-off problem (RCDTCTP), especially for large-scale projects. In this paper a new heuristic method is designed and developed to achieve fast and high-quality solutions for the large-scale RCDTCTP. The proposed method is based on the novel principles to enable effective exploration of the search space through adequate...

Citation Formats

S. Kiziltas and B. Akinci, “Contextual Information Requirements of Cost Estimators from Past Construction Projects,” JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT, pp. 841–852, 2009, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/64751.