An Expert system for a competitive bid estimation of an electrical installation project

Abstract

Construction Industry in Sri Lanka has started to boom from few years back and is going to reach its peak now, therefore, companies require to have more attention on bid estimation in terms of the accuracy and the competitiveness since there are lots of competitors who are always searching for wining their bids. When it comes to electrical installation field, it is more complex and must be handled by experience quantity surveyor (QS) with a sound supervision from an electrical engineer so that requirements stipulated in the bidding documents are to be well-understood and quoted accordingly. However the current issues are (i) all the electrical contractors cannot afford to have expertise knowledge on this context and even if had, cannot employ for continuous operation because it tends to reduce the accuracy level of the output. (ii) Conventional estimation techniques are still not reviewed so that continuous improvements on techniques of bidding should be promoted so that introduction of more reliable system would be useful to reduce the complexity of bid estimation process and release the pressure on the estimator in turn. (iii) Application of software base expert systems is still not developed and not applied in the electrical installation perspective in Sri Lanka and implementing such a system should be considered to solve the matter efficiently. Therefore this research will use expertise knowledge to build a knowledge base expert system and the same will be implemented in software base so that the end result is to overcome prevailing issues in electrical bid estimation in Sri Lanka.