Estimate Final Cost of Roads Using Support Vector Machine

Introduction

The cost overrun in road construction projects in Iraq is one of the major problems that face the construction of new roads.

Method

To enable the concerned government agencies to predict the final cost of roads, the objective this paper suggested is to develop an early cost estimating model for road projects using a support vector machine based on (43) sets of bills of quantity collected in Baghdad city in Iraq. As cost estimates are required at the early stages of a project, consideration was given to the fact that the input data for the support vector machine model could be easily extracted from sketches or the project's scope definition.

Result

The data were collected from contracts awarded by the Mayoralty of Baghdad for completed projects between 2010-2013. Mathematical equations were constructed using the Support Vector Machine Algorithm (SMO) technique.

Conclusion

An average of accuracy (AA) (99.65%) and coefficient of determination (R2) (97.63%) for the model were achieved by the created prediction equations.