Cash flow Forecasting in Construction Industry Using Soft Computing Approach

The cash flow forecasting is normally done by contractors in construction industry at early stages of the project for contractual decisions. The decision making in such situations involve uncertainty about future cash flows and assessment of working capital requirements gains more importance in projects constrained by cash. The traditional approach to assess the working capital requirements is deterministic in and neglects the uncertainty. This paper presents an alternate approach to assessment of working capital requirements for contractor based on fuzzy set theory by considering the uncertainty and ambiguity involved at payment periods. Statistical methods are used to deal with the uncertainty for working capital curves. Membership functions of the fuzzy sets are developed based on these statistical measures. Advantage of fuzzy peak working capital requirements is demonstrated using peak working capital requirements curves. Fuzzy peak working capital requirements curves are compared with deterministic curves and the results are analyzed. Fuzzy weighted average methodology is proposed for the assessment of peak working capital requirements.