Data-Driven Decision Support for Equipment Selection and Maintenance Issues for Buildings

Equipment costs play a critical role in decision making during design and construction, which requires up-to-date information and data. The design of this study incorporates the inputs from the literature review on the influencing factors of equipment costs and major targeted equipment types to enhance decision support for equipment selection, project construction, and maintenance issues. Two traditional cost estimation methods and five machine-learning methods were compared in this study to identify significant attributes related to the predictions of the costs and residual values of each targeted equipment type. The novelty of this study is that the developed method improves prediction accuracy by establishing a comprehensive and well-structured database framework. A comparison of this method with the existing prediction models reveals that the results and the accuracy of multiple regression analysis are improved in the range of (3% to 33.97%) with the use of a modified decision-tree model combined with support vector machines. The major contribution of this research is the design, implementation, and validation of a machine-learning-based modified decision tree with a support vector machine model for improved accuracy and decision support in construction management. Future research should consider the relationship between geographical variations and value changes.