Knowledge-Based Systems 15 (2002) 177±188

www.elsevier.com/locate/knosys

Knowledge based-system for alternative design, cost estimating

and scheduling
Abdulrezak Mohamed a,*, Tahir Celik b,1
a
Assistant Prof., Department of Civil Engineering, Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazimagusa, Mersin 10, Turkey
b
Prof., Department of Civil Engineering, Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazimagusa, Mersin 10, Turkey
Received 1 August 2000; accepted 2 February 2001

Abstract
The traditional design, cost estimating and scheduling procedures focus on assessing costs and schedule after design decisions are made
and conveyed to construction drawings and design that is, they do not have a mechanism that allow the designer to perform a rapid `what if'
analysis on design alternatives and cost analysis of different types of building materials and alternative schedule analysis at early stage of
project without accompanying of detailed design and drawing. Moreover, the available scheduling tools are not integrated to design and cost
estimating system and hence require manual input of activities lists, activities sequencing, resources, costs and durations to generate project
schedule and they are unable to consider the effect of productivity factors and the resulting uncertainty inherent in each activity. This paper
presents an integrated knowledge based system for construction cost estimating and scheduling. The knowledge based system supports an
automated alternative design analysis with on line schematic drawing, material selection, crew selection and productivity analysis for
generating activities sequencing, normal durations, productivity adjusted durations, cost estimate, list of materials selected and their
respective quantities and list of assigned crew. An analysis of alternative design, cost estimating and scheduling for a residential building
using the integrated system is presented. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Cost estimating; Building design; Planning and scheduling; Productivity; Expert system

1. Introduction resulting costs, and have no alternative material selection

Building design and material type used are the two main
parameters that have signi®cant impact on the cost of a
building. However, the traditional design Ð cost estimating
procedures generally focus on assessing costs after design
decisions are made and conveyed to construction drawing as
in quantity take off. On the other hand, comparative cost
estimating (unit cost per square meter) uses historical data,
which is collected by averaging buildings of different
design, height and materials. Even today's Computer
Aided Design (CAD) incorporate mechanism to take off
quantities from completed design and drawings; however,
basically are same as the traditional quantity take off esti-
mating because a single speci®ed design still controls the
* Corresponding author. Tel.: 190-392-630-2359; fax: 190-392-365-
0710.
E-mail addresses: abdulrezak.mohamed@emu.edu.tr (A. Mohamed),
tahir@emu.edu.tr (T. Celik), celik@iit.edu (T. Celik).
1
Tel.: 190-392-630-1443; fax: 190-392-366-4479.
0950-7051/02/$ - see front matter q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0950-705 1(01)00155-1
integrated to the cost system.
Once the client's wants are translated into detailed design
and drawings, it is very costly and time consuming to revisit
these decisions because the project must be redesigned and
redrawn to accommodate changes. Because redesign is so
costly and time consuming, the engineer/architect selects
one solution with which he/she is most familiar without
investigating different design solutions and different build-
ing materials that satisfy the client's needs and ®nancial
constraints.
More over, computer based schedule analysis for project
management have been used since late 1950's with the
introduction of Critical Path Method (CPM). Obviously,
advances in computer technology have greatly facilitated
the use of CPM and many Personal Computer (PC) oriented
scheduling Softwares such as Primavera project planner,
Microsoft project, Auto plan, Artemis, project scheduler
etc. become available at reasonable prices. Despite the
advances in computer technology, these computerized
algorithmic scheduling systems require complete input of
activity description, precedence relationships, duration and
178 A. Mohamed, T. Celik / Knowledge-Based Systems 15 (2002) 177±188
allocation of resources for each activity. In fact, they are
more of schedule report generators and calculators rather
than scheduling tools that aid and provide alternative
solutions to schedulers and project managers. This state-
ment is not intended to down play the major improvements
that computer automation have made in avoiding mathema-
tical errors found in hand calculation of activities: early
start, early ®nish, late start, late ®nish, ¯oat and identifying
the critical path. However, basically, most of the task at ®rst
painstakingly is performed manually by the scheduler. The
scheduler should formulate the net work, sequences
activities, and calculates activities durations and cost in
order to prepare input data for these scheduling tools.
Because forming schedule manually is very costly and
time consuming the scheduler cannot perform several
schedule alternative to evaluate time integrated cost that
indicate the timing of capital needs for the design decisions
and construction methods selection.
This paper presents an integrated knowledge based
system for alternative design decisions, material selection,
cost estimating and alternative schedule analysis by
simulating the different factors that affect productivity.
The knowledge based system Alternative Design Cost
Estimating and Scheduling (ADCES) has two parts. The
®rst main part is for alternative design, cost estimating
and schedule analysis in the predesign stage with auto-
mated on line schematic drawing displays. Here the
designer/user inputs general information of project, such
as building type, ¯oor area, roof type etc. and selects
material types from series of material selection displays,
assigns number of crew from series of crew selection
displays and assigns productivity factors that re¯ect possi-
ble project site conditions from a series of productivity
factor selection displays. Then the system by integrating
the user input and selection with experts knowledge,
building regulations, design criteria, and current cost
data, generates quantities, cost, activity lists, normal
activity durations, adjusted activity durations, bill of
materials and list of assigned crew. The system allows
the designer engineer/architect to perform a rapid cost
analysis of design alternatives, schedule alternatives and
different use of materials prior to expending resources for
detailed engineering analysis and drawings. Once the
designer reaches to project design and cost that meets
the client's needs he/she could proceed with greater
ease and con®dence for detailed engineering analysis
and drawings. The second part of the system is material
selection, cost estimating and alternative schedule analy-
sis when detailed design and drawing are available. The
input for the second part is received in two ways: either
the designer inputs manually into edit table the dimen-
sions of building from completed drawing and design or if
a CAD and Structural design soft ware is used the result-
ing output can be imported to ADCES from Microsoft
Excele after few adjustment that ®ts the format of
LEVEL5 object design class.
2. Knowledge based systems application and object
oriented models in construction
Knowledge based expert systems have been a subject of
considerable research in civil engineering in recent years,
especially in the area of construction engineering and
management [1±7]. This section brie¯y describes several
previous work that used knowledge based systems and
object oriented models for schedule generation and/or cost
estimating.
Construction Planex [1] uses a bottom±up approach to
generate construction plan. It generates element activities
for the building components, aggregates the element activ-
ities into project activities, assigns crew type and size,
sequences the project activities, estimates costs, and dura-
tions. However, Construction Planex requires detailed
descriptions of design elements (dimensions and co-ordi-
nates) and it deals only with excavation and erection build-
ing skeleton and does not interact with any computer-aided
design systems. GHOST [2] takes as an input a set of
activities to be performed and produces as output scheduling
by setting up precedence relationships among activities.
SIPE [3] generates and sequences repetitive activities but
does not consider construction costs and durations. ESCHE-
DULER [4] is a rule based hybrid prototype system for
construction planning and scheduling. It uses rules to
standardize activity description, determines activity
sequences, and adjusts user input activity durations due to
variations in productivity and does not consider cost.
CONSCHED [5] generates activities list, activities sequen-
cing and durations. However, CONSCHED requires user
input quantity and productivity rates to generate activity
durations and does not consider cost. HISCHED [6] gener-
ates activities list, determines dependencies between activ-
ities and schedules activities. ICEMS [7] is an integrated
system for alternative design decision, material selection
and cost estimating mainly for predesign analysis.
CONSCOM [8,9] is an object oriented information model
for construction scheduling, cost optimization and change
order management. The model can be used by the owner as
an intelligent decision support system in schedule reviews,
progress monitoring and cost-time trade off analysis for
change order particularly for highway construction.
This paper like the aforementioned works addresses the
integration of alternative design, cost estimating and
scheduling. It addresses the problem at two stages: (a) At
predesign stage with general information of project provides
early cost and schedule estimate. (b) After detailed design
for alternative material selection, cost estimating and alter-
native schedule analysis.
3. System development
This section outlines the development and implementa-
tion of the system and describes its basic components.
 A. Mohamed, T. Celik / Knowledge-Based Systems 15 (2002) 177±188
Fig. 1. Structure of knowledge base.
3.1. Structure of knowledge base
The structure of knowledge base has the following
components as shown in Fig. 1.
(1) The knowledge based system is implemented on
object oriented environment by using LEVEL 5
OBJECT w for Microsoft w Windowse release 3.6 by
Information Builders Inc.[10,11]. LEVEL 5 Object has
an integrated array of powerful tools: Graphical User
interface development, forms and display builders and
has the capability to chain more than one knowledge
base together. It accesses to all common data base formats
and SQL, interfaces to external programs, has communi-
cation paradigms, text ®les, timers, and custom interfacing
options and can be used as DDE server. (2) Microsoft
Excele version 5.0 is used for storing data of several
project trials, and drawing graphs for easy comparison
purpose. It stores weather data, average temperature,
humidity, and average rain. It is also used to receive
design data from PROBINA w in order to make few dele-
tions and adjustment that suits the format of LEVEL 5
OBJECT w design knowledge library classes. (3) PROBI-
NA w is a Computer Aided Design and Drafting and struc-
tural design soft ware version 8.5 for Microsoft Windows
by Prota Bilgisayar [12]. (4) Microsoft Project for
windowse or Primaverae based on user selection are
used for generation of schedule report.
4. Knowledge acquisition
An important part of building knowledge based system is
acquiring the knowledge needed to achieve a desired level
of performance. The system's knowledge was acquired
179
through three sources: (1) literature review, (2) experts
interaction, (3) foreman delay survey.
1. Literature review was conducted in three directions (a)
literature about construction cost estimating, bidding and
scheduling: [13±22]. (b) Literature about factors that
affect productivity on construction site and methods of
quantifying the productivity levels: [23±31]. (c) Expert
system application and object oriented models in
construction management [1±9], [32±38].
2. Expert interaction were done with three parts: (a) Regular
visits were paid to top three construction companies in
the region and structured interviews were conducted with
the companies' design engineers, cost estimators and
schedulers. For the purpose of this study, the buildings
were classi®ed as residential buildings, of®ces and
schools and further classi®cations are made as low-rise,
mid-rise and high-rise. The knowledge concerning the
building types were grouped under six categories:
general, architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical
and ®nishes. Special forms were prepared to tabulate
the knowledge extracted from experts and separate
records were kept for each company. The design experts
(Engineers and Architects) were requested to give their
engineering judgment and dimensions of building
elements for different category. To supplement their
experiential design knowledge a thorough and extensive
study were done for different built historical projects.
The elicited knowledge were then put into their respec-
tive design knowledge library classes. For the ®nishing
part of the building, the architects and design engineers'
practical knowledge and judgments have been consid-
ered in similar manner. (b) Regular meetings were
conducted with professional engineers and architects
180 A. Mohamed, T. Celik / Knowledge-Based Systems 15 (2002) 177±188
Fig. 2. On-line schematic drawing display for selected design parameters and input.
responsible for building new faculty buildings, repair and
maintenance of the university campus. (c) Lecturers in
the Department of Civil Engineering have been the main
domain experts for building design criteria according to
TS500 (Turkish Standard 500). Practical equations were
formulated for the calculation of required reinforcements
for different structural elements for predesign analysis.
(d) Materials costs that are not available in the unit prices
list, which are published by the Ministry of Public Work
and Housing were collected directly from material
suppliers.
3. Foreman delay survey was carried out in four different
sites over a period of nine months in order to identify
factors that affect productivity and quantify loss factors
(percentage) for the different factors under different
conditions for the locale. Tucker's method is adopted
in analyzing and evaluating the foreman's delay survey
[39].
5. Knowledge representation
After the knowledge acquisition stage reached a suf®cient
point that allow an ef®cient system to be developed, the
knowledge representation had been started. The knowledge
in the system is represented by a group of objects. Each
group of objects is represented by a class with its attributes.
In LEVEL5 OBJECT w, a class de®nes the general proper-
ties and structure of a group of objects and attributes
describe the object's important characteristics. The values
of these attributes for a particular instance are obtained from
the following sources: (1) querying the user; (2) methods,
rules, demons, facets or the PURSUE command, and (3)
knowledge library classes.
In ADCES knowledge is represented in three main types
of classes: (a) knowledge library classes, (b) selection
classes, and (c) project classes.
(a) Knowledge library classes contain design, construc-
tion crew, cost and productivity level of information.
They have prede®ned instances and serve as a data
base. The library classes will not be modi®ed or adjusted
during estimating and scheduling processes with the
exception of cost library. However, all library classes
can be changed from instance editors to re¯ect the
changes in construction location and time. The library
classes are categorized into ®ve groups.
(i) Design library classes: consist of a collection of
classes which contain design information for different
building category. In addition to the different knowl-
edge of structural elements of building category, the
major important part of ADCES is its ability on
displaying on-line architectural schematic drawings
of building selections made particularly for predesign
analysis as shown in Fig. 2. Each schematic drawing
has a corresponding class that contains its dimensions
and is displayed in an edit table from which the
designer can make changes for his particular run by
 A. Mohamed, T. Celik / Knowledge-Based Systems 15 (2002) 177±188
Fig. 3. Edit table for displayed schematic drawing.
over writing the values in the edit table as shown in Fig.
3. This approach is a very quick and effective way for
the architects/design engineers to communicate with
the client's desires particularly at brie®ng stage.
Once the client is satis®ed with on-line schematic
drawing or commented on modi®cations, the design
engineer proceeds to the second important step;
performing alternative design analysis, material selec-
tion and schedule analysis.
(ii) Cost library class: contains the unit prices and it is
attached to the edit table and is displayed in cost
display as shown in Fig. 4 from which the user can
change the unit prices for his/her particular run by
editing on the edit table.
(iii) Crew library class: contains information about the
crew type, crew description and daily crew productiv-
ity as shown in Fig. 5.
(iv) Productivity level library class: contains produc-
tivity levels for the different productivity factors under
different conditions.
(v) Weather library class: contains the average
temperature, humidity and average rain and their corre-
sponding productivity levels. The productivity level
related to cold weather and hot/warm weather is
obtained from Koehn and Brown [40] mathematical
equations. The values of these mathematical equations
for cold and hot weather for the year, is imported from
Microsoft Excel to weather library class. The effect of
rain unlike temperature and humidity, which has been
quanti®ed with mathematical equations, has not been
181
quanti®ed with mathematical equations. It has been
mostly dealt in probabilistic approach. For the purpose
of this study a similar approach to Benjamin and
Greenwald [41], and Car [42], has been adopted.
Threshold values are established and based on the
threshold values, the productivity levels are deter-
mined.
(b) Selection classes: contain design and scheduling para-
meters, type of materials, type and number of crew and
productivity factors. Each type of design and scheduling
parameters, type of materials etc. are represented by
compound attributes and the compound attributes are
attached to series of design selection, material selection,
crew selection, and productivity factors selection displays
as shown in Figs. 6±8. The compound attributes also have
attached methods, demons and production rules, which
are part of the different of process modules.
(c) Project classes: contain QTO and cost class, activity
class, schedule class, aggregated cost class and list of
selected material class, as shown in Figs. 9±11 respec-
tively. The instances and attribute values of these classes
are created and determined by process modules. The
process modules consists of production rules, methods,
demons and system commands. There are six types of
process modules that perform different types of processes
and these are (i) Quantity take off process modules, (ii)
cost generation process module, (iii) schedule process
module, (iv) productivity analysis process module, (v)
material aggregation process modules and vi) cost aggre-
gation process modules.
182 A. Mohamed, T. Celik / Knowledge-Based Systems 15 (2002) 177±188

Fig. 4. Unit prices list display.

6. Operation of the system 1. User selects the design and scheduling parameters from a
series of design selection displays. If the cost estimate and
ADCES performs the following sequence of operations in the selected scheduling is predesign, ADCES presents the
generating cost, quantities and schedule of project: user predesign input display for editing the general project

Fig. 5. Crew description display.

 A. Mohamed, T. Celik / Knowledge-Based Systems 15 (2002) 177±188 183

Fig. 6. Typical material selection display.

information such as block number, ¯oor number, ¯oor 2. Based on user design and scheduling selection and input
area, ¯at area, roof type, etc. For each input of ¯oor ADCES creates instances for the design elements in the
area, ¯at areas and selection of design parameters QTO class. By integrating the experts judgment, engi-
ADCES displays a typical schematic drawing. neering criteria and user selection and input ADCES

Fig. 7. Typical crew selection displays.

184 A. Mohamed, T. Celik / Knowledge-Based Systems 15 (2002) 177±188

Fig. 8. Typical productivity factor selection display.

generates quantities for each element. Similar process values of instances of after detailed design knowledge
modules used to generate quantities for predesign analy- library are imported from CAD and structural design
sis are also used for after detailed design; however, the soft ware or edited manually whereas for predesign
design knowledge libraries are different, the attribute analysis they are prede®ned.

Fig. 9. Generated schedule display.

 A. Mohamed, T. Celik / Knowledge-Based Systems 15 (2002) 177±188 185

Fig. 10. Aggregated cost display table.

3. ADCES displays unit prices display, as shown in Fig. 4 found it to be less/more than the market prices during
before material selection display in order to give the the estimating period. This is very important particu-
user a thorough information about material cost. The larly in countries where in¯ation rate is high.
user can change the unit prices of any item if he/she 4. ADCES displays material selection displays for the user

Fig. 11. Generated bill of materials display table.

186 A. Mohamed, T. Celik / Knowledge-Based Systems 15 (2002) 177±188

Fig. 12. Interactive and iterative processes between user and system.

to select the type of material he/she would prefer to use
as shown in Fig. 6.
5. By using the current unit prices of materials selected,
ADCES generates costs, and breaks the cost of each
design element into material, labor and equipment cost.
6. ADCES creates instances in activity class and
sequences activities and determines quantities of activ-
ities by aggregating from QTO class. ADCES
sequences activities based on physical, and/or resources
related relationship.
7. ADCES displays crew description display before crew
selection displays in order to give the user thorough
information about crew type, equipment and crew
daily output. Then user assigns crew number from
crew selection displays as shown in Fig. 7.
8. Using the generated quantities and assigned crew sizes
ADCES generates normal activities durations and
assigns crews to each activity.
9. ADCES display productivity analysis displays. If the
user selects perform productivity analysis, ADCES
 A. Mohamed, T. Celik / Knowledge-Based Systems 15 (2002) 177±188
displays a series of productivity factor selection display
for the user to specify the productivity factors that
re¯ect the job and site conditions of the project as
shown in Fig. 8. Then ADCES generates productivity
impacted durations as shown in Fig. 9.
10. ADCES aggregates cost either according to Building
Speci®cation Institute (BSI) masterformat or Construc-
tion Speci®cation Institute (CSI) masterformat based on
the user selection from design and scheduling displays
as shown in Fig. 10.
11. ADCES lists the selected materials and aggregates the
quantities of each selected material for the whole
project as shown in Fig. 11.
12. The user can repeat the process several times by
changing the building design, building materials and
assigning different crew sizes and methods until he
meets the optimum point that satis®es his/her cost and
schedule constraint. Interactive and Iterative process
between the user and system is shown in Fig. 12.
7. System evaluation
The performance of ADCES predesign analysis and after
detailed design analysis was evaluated with respect to low-
rise and mid-rise residential buildings. The performance is
rated against the measures of accuracy and timeliness. To
perform the evaluation, ®rst historical data of several built
low rise and mid rise residential buildings have been
obtained from construction companies. The new cost of
each building is found by using current unit prices. Then,
ADCES is used for generating the quantity, material cost,
labor cost, equipment cost and list of materials selected and
their respective quantities for the same projects. The results
obtained from ADCES predesign analysis and selection,
were compared with actual values. The total costs were
found to vary between the range of 2.1±4.21% depending
on the complexity of the design. These differences are insig-
ni®cant comparing to the timely decisions and alternative
design and cost analysis mechanism provided by ADCES at
the moment when they are mostly needed.
In the second case, a manual schedule was prepared inde-
pendently, and then compared with the schedule produced
by ADCES in terms of: (i) whether the schedule includes all
the activities necessary for completion. (ii) Are the sequence
of activities produced reasonable and agree to the ones
produced manually and (iii) Are activities durations gener-
ated reasonable. In all respects, the evaluation and compar-
isons proved that the schedule generated by ADCES were
satisfactory. The time required to generate the quantities,
costs, bill of materials, activities durations, activities
sequence and crew assignment was found to be 8±16 min
depending on whether the productivity analysis will be
performed or not and complexity of the project. Whereas
187
it would take several days for an experienced engineer to
take off quantities, ®nd cost and produce schedule for each
of the project. The timely decisions provided by ADCES
makes it a valuable asset to engineers and schedulers parti-
cularly at the predesign stage.
8. Conclusions
Traditional design, cost estimating and scheduling takes
many man hours of detailed effort to measure the quantities
from design drawings and then compute the costs separately
and lastly the designer/scheduler translates the design infor-
mation to activity lists, and formulates the network to
prepare input for the traditional scheduling tool. This is
costly and time consuming to be used to search for alter-
native design solutions, cost analysis and alternative
schedule analysis particularly at predesign stage. In this
study, an automated construction cost estimating and
scheduling is presented. The automated system addresses
the integration of cost estimating and scheduling at two
stages; at predesign stage and after detailed design stage.
ADCES has several notable features such as the automated
schematic displays, the alternative design analysis at prede-
sign stage, the alternative material and crew selection at
both stages, and alternative schedule analysis simulating
the different productivity factors at both stages. More
notable is its timeliness and accuracy which makes a true
valuable value engineering tool prior to design and a
valuable analysis tool after design.
Acknowledgements
The writers would like to thank the Eng. Fuat Kutlu
general director of Korman Const. Co. and all the staff of
Korman Const. Co. and their subcontractors, Eng. Yurdaer
Garip of Makro Teknik Co. and Eng. M. Tunar of Project
Technique for lending their expertise and providing us
valuable data in developing ADCES.
The writers have received valuable input from several
colleagues in the Depts. of Civil Eng., architecture and
Mechanical Eng.: Prof. Dr A. Topcu, Dr Erden Karaboga,
Arch. Fevzi Ozerbey, and Dr Mustafa Dagbasi. We grate-
fully acknowledge their valuable contributions.
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