In Turkey, for the preliminary construction cost estimation, a notice, which is updated and published annually by Turkish Ministry of the Environment and Urbanism, known as “unit area cost method” (UACM) is generally employed. However, it’s known that the costs obtained through this method in which only construction area is taken into consideration have significant differences from actual costs. The aim of this study is to compare the cost estimations obtained through “multi layer perceptron” (MLP) and “radial basis function” (RBF), which are commonly used artificial neural network (ANN) methods. The results of MLP and RBF were also compared with the results of UACM and the validity of UACM was interpreted. Dataobtained from 232 public construction projects, which completed between 2003 and 2011 in different regions of Turkey, were reviewed. Consequently, estimated costs obtained from RBF were found to be higher than the actual costs with a 0.28% variance, while the estimated costs obtained from MLP were higher than actual values with a 1.11% variance. The approximate costs obtained from UACM are higher than actual costs with a 28.73% variance. It was found that both ANN methods were showed better performance than the UACM but RBF was superior to MLP.
This paper investigates the adequacy of some nontraditional approaches to produce realistic forecasts of the final costs of building projects and compare them with forecasts produced by three traditional methods, the unit area costs (UAC), client detailed costs (UPA), and contract sums (CS). As a case study, data of the actual final costs and forecasts produced using the three traditional methods for 420 finished public building projects carried out in Turkey were collected. Based on 75% of the collected data (i.e., 316 projects), three cost models based on UAC, UPA, and CS were established. The remaining 25% of the data (104 projects) were used as control data for testing the accuracies of forecasts produced by the different approaches. Cost forecasts using five nontraditional approaches, namely multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis function (RBF), grid partitioning algorithm (GPA), reference class forecasting (RCF), and regression analysis (RA) were then produced and compared with the actual final costs of projects of the control data. The forecasts were compared using four standard error measures: root-mean-square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and overall index of model performance (OI). Results of the analysis have shown that although the efficacy of each method to produce forecasts closer to the actual final costs varied depending on the model used, in general however, RCF and RA seem to produce more accurate and realistic forecasts than the other methods. As such the work described in the paper represents valuable contributions to knowledge and practice, firstly because RCF has not been used or tested before for cost forecasting of building projects. Secondly such comparison among the various methods and approaches used has not been found in published literature. Finally the paper provides guidance as to what approach to use at what stage of the project as well as how realistic the expected forecasts are.
Bu çalışmada; son üç yıl içerisinde Türkiye"nin 39 farklı şehrinde gerçekleşmiş, ulusal medyada haber olarak yayımlanmış ve inşaat sektöründe yaşanmış olan toplam 107 iş kazası ele alınmıştır. Örneklemi oluşturan iş kazaları; yapım türlerine, oluş nedenlerine, gün içerisinde gerçekleştikleri zamanlara ve meydana geldikleri aylara göre sınıflandırılmışlardır. Üstyapı projelerinin gerek ölüm gerekse yaralanma açısından altyapı projelerine göre daha ağır sonuçlar doğurduğu sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. Bunun yanısıra, Malatya ilinde faaliyet gösteren altı farklı inşaat firmasının şantiyelerinde aktif olarak çalışmakta olan toplam 50 çalışana, 14 sorudan oluşan bir anket çalışması uygulanmıştır. Şantiyelerde iş sağlığı ve güvenliği kavramına verilen ehemmiyetin eğitim seviyesinden ziyade çalışılan firmanın büyüklük ölçeği ile ilişkilendirilebileceği sonucuna ulaşılmıştır.
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