To carry out a one-off construction project successfully, effective and accurate early cost estimation is crucial, especially during the conceptual stage where very limited minimum information of construction project is given. As the level of accuracy of the early cost estimation has huge impacts on precise budgeting and cost management of a project, in other words, reducing the risk of a project, cost must be managed with special awareness. In an effort to improve the estimate accuracy of cost during the conceptual stage, this research introduces a Parameter Impact (PI) which can quantify weights of parameters and rank them; and PI development derived from the principle of impulse in physics is explicated. For a case study, 76 public apartment building cases in Korea are analyzed. To examine the validity of the proposed PI, a validation in terms of CBR applicability test and estimate accuracy comparisons using 10-nearest neighbor cases are carried out. The validation results support that the suggested PI can be applied in quantifying the weights of the parameters and CBR method for early cost estimation.
This research was supported by grants (R&D06CIT-A03) from the Innovative Construction Cost Engineering Research Center and (code # 09 R&D A01) from Super-Tall Building R&D Project funded by the Ministry of Land, Transport and Marine Affairs of Korean Government.