"One click" cost estimation tool for the design of "form-active strctures"

Abstract

Unreasonable cost decisions often lead to fatal consequences for the partners involved into the planning/building process of the project. Many projects -most of them considered ambitioned, new and promising at the beginning- failed just because of the "cost explosion" toward the projects end, i.e. due to the fact that costs have not been estimated properly during each step of the design. Such an underestimation may present details in a way that is too optimistic to hold in reality. This paper describes an approach to prevent this problem and presents a tool for an accurate cost estimation for the design of form-active structures. This is achieved by combining mechanisms for the user assistance, data analysis and form-finding with the capabilities of extracting and using knowledge about projects already completed/estimated in the past.