Working Out The Quantities of Civil Engineering Structures

Abstract

Cost estimation is the most important preliminary process in any construction project. Therefore, construction cost
estimation has the lion’s share of the research effort in construction management. In this paper, we have analysed and studied
proposals for construction cost estimation for the last 10 years. To implement this survey, we have proposed and applied a
methodology that consists of two parts. The first part concerns data collection, for which we have chosen special journals as sources
for the surveyed proposals.
The second part concerns the analysis of the proposals. To analyse each proposal, the following four questions have been
set. Which intelligent technique is used? How have data been collected? How are the results validated? And which construction cost
estimation factors have been used? From the results of this survey, two main contributions have been produced. The first contribution
is the defining of the research gap in this area, which has not been fully covered by previous proposals of construction cost estimation.
The second contribution of this survey is the proposal and highlighting of future directions for forthcoming proposals, aimed
ultimately at finding the optimal construction cost estimation. Moreover, we consider the second part of our methodology as one of our
contributions in this paper. This methodology has been proposed as a standard benchmark for construction cost estimation proposals.