Automated Item Matching and Pricing (IMP) for Wood Building Elements to Support BIM-Based Wood Construction Cost Estimation

摘要

A major gap in the automation of construction cost estimation is the need of manual inputs to complete cost estimation processes. To address this gap, the authors propose a new method for matching wood building elements from a building information modeling (BIM)-based design to cost data entries in a cost database. The proposed method uses a java constructor and HashMap to create objects, and store and retrieve the created values of the objects. Term matching and natural language processing (NLP) techniques are used in the method to match items from a design model and automatically extract their unit costs from a cost database. These unit costs retrieved are then used in generating the cost estimates. The proposed method was tested on estimating a wood construction model retrieved online. A cost estimate was successfully generated. Comparison of the experimental results with results from the state-of-the-art commercial software showed that the algorithms developed from the proposed method reduced the manual inputs required in generating wood construction cost estimates.