Spatiotemporal Visualization of Unit Price Data of Highway Projects

The unit price contracting is the standard contracting method for highway projects in the U.S. As a result, state highway agencies have collected a large amount of historical bid data that they can use to determine engineer's estimates for future projects. The estimator must carefully consider various characteristics of a new project such as its location to determine an engineer's estimate as accurate as possible before bid letting. Higher cost estimates can result in the loss of the available budget and lower cost estimates may lead to deferral and delay of projects. The study uses the historical bid data obtained from Iowa Department of Transportation and develops a Geographic Information System (GIS) tool to visually show the variation of unit prices over the map using a spatial interpolation technique. The interpolation map can be used to estimate the unit price of the item at any location across Iowa. This noble method allows the estimator to effectively and fully utilize the historical bid data in a very time efficient manner and determine more accurate cost estimation.