Cost Estimation and Negotiation Agent for Home Construction

Abstract

A cost estimate establishes the base line of the project cost at different stages of development of the project. At a given stage of project development, this represents a prediction provided by the cost engineer or estimator on the basis of available data. The negotiation between the budgeted amount of homeowner and the estimation of the system is also the important stage of the construction project. This paper intends to support the engineer and contractor of home construction as the Decision Support System (DSS). Technically, the software is the desktop, single-user DSS which support the cost estimation and cost negotiation of home construction with the help of agent technology. This paper supports the engineers with fast and easy calculations in cost estimation. This system also applies the human negotiation style in agent technology with user friendly interface. Application domain of this paper is the home construction with relevant civil engineering techniques, such as Plinth Area Estimate (P.A.E) method and Cubical Content Estimate (C.C.E) method. The proposed system is implemented by C# programming language with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 environment.