Bidding is a very competitive process in the construction industry; each
competitor’s business is based on winning or losing these bids. Contractors would like to
predict the bids that may be submitted by their competitors. This will help contractors to
obtain contracts and increase their business. Unit prices that are estimated for each
quantity differ from contractor to contractor. These unit costs are dependent on factors
such as historical data used for estimating unit costs, vendor quotes, market surveys,
amount of material estimated, number of projects the contractor is working on,
equipment rental costs, the amount of equipment owned by the contractor, and the risk
averseness of the estimator. These factors are nearly similar when estimators are
estimating cost of similar projects. Thus, there is a relationship between the projects that
a particular contractor has bid in previous years and the cost the contractor is likely to
quote for future projects. This relationship could be used to predict bids that the
contractor might quote for future projects. For example, a contractor may use historical
data for a certain year for bidding on certain type of projects, the unit prices may be
adjusted for size, time and location, but the basis for bidding on projects of similar types
is the same. Statistical tools can be used to model the underlying relationship between the final cost of the project quoted by a contractor to the quantities of materials or
amount of tasks performed in a project. There are a number of statistical modeling
techniques, but a model used for predicting costs should be flexible enough that it could
adjust to depict any underlying pattern.
Data such as amount of work to be performed for a certain line item, material
cost index, labor cost index and a unique identifier for each participating contractor is
used to predict bids that a contractor might quote for a certain project. To perform the
analysis, artificial neural networks and multivariate adaptive regression splines are used.
The results obtained from both the techniques are compared, and it is found that
multivariate adaptive regression splines are able to predict the cost better than artificial
neural networks.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1464 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Pawar, Roshan |
| Contributors | Guikema, Seth |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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