Developing an intelligent system for teaching pre-tender cost estimating of office building projects

Pre‐tender cost estimating of office building projects requires extensive knowledge and expertise. Due to the lack of design information in the early design stages, it is extremely difficult for cost engineers or quantity surveyors to arrive at an accurate cost estimate. This paper presents the design and testing of a knowledge‐based system that enables students to learn cost estimating of building projects in the conceptual design stages. The system, embedded with knowledge from experts, has been proved to be a very useful teaching and learning tool. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 9: 26–36, 2001