ESTIMATING COSTS DURING THE INITIAL STAGE OF CONCEPTUAL PLANNING FOR PUBLIC ROAD PROJECTS: CASE-BASED REASONING APPROACH

Estimating project costs during the early stage of conceptual planning is very important when deciding whether to approve the project and allocate an appropriate budget. However, due to greater uncertainties involved in a project, it is challenging to estimate costs during this initial stage within a reasonable tolerance. This paper attempts to develop a cost-estimate model for public road projects under these circumstances and limitations. In the conceptual planning stage of a road project, there is only limited information for cost estimation, for example, such input data as total length of the route, origin and destination, number of lanes, general geographic characteristics of the route, and other basic attributes. This implies that the model should individuate suitable but restricted information without considering detailed features such as quantity of earthwork and a detailed route of a given condition. With these limited facts, this paper applies a case-based reasoning (CBR) method to solve a new problem by deriving similar past problems, which in turn is used to estimate the cost of a given project based on best-fitted previous cases. To develop a CBR cost-estimate model, the authors classified 8 representative variables, including project type, the number of lanes, total length, road design grades, etc. Then, we developed the CBR model, primarily by using 180 actual cases of public road projects, procured over the last decade. With the CBR model, it was found that the degree of error in estimation can be reasonably reduced, to below approximately 30% compared to the final costs estimated upon the completion of detailed design.