Building client/owners need estimates of likely construction costs for budgeting purposes early in the procurement process when little detailed design information is available beyond the type, size and location of the facility. One of the more sophisticated techniques available for this purpose is the storey enclosure method, developed by James in 1954. This uses the basic physical measurements of the building envelope, together with an arbitrary set of multipliers, or weights, to forecast tender/bid prices. Although seldom used in practice, James succeeded in showing his method to be capable of significantly outperforming alternative approaches.
The research reported in this paper aimed firstly to reassess James’ claims with new data and secondly to advance his method by using regression techniques to obtain the weights involved. Based on data from 138 completed Hong Kong projects for four types of building, two types of regression models were developed. This involved the use of sophisticated features such as leave-one-out cross validation to simulate the way in which forecasts are produced in practice and a dual stepwise selection strategy that enhances the chance of identifying the best model. An algorithm was also designed to select the appropriate parametric and non-parametric tests for objective and rigorous model evaluation against alternatives.
The results indicate that, contrary to James’ claim, both his original method and the two regression-based alternatives are not significantly better or worse than other models. Surprisingly, the widely used floor area model was found to under-perform in terms of consistency for offices and private housing. For private housing in particular, it was felt that the storey enclosure method was likely to offer good prospects of improvement on those methods currently in use in practice. 相似文献
The structural behaviour of thin-walled circular cylindrical members has been shown to be imperfection sensitive. However, only little information of the exact nature of imperfections in such members is available. In this paper a method of measuring imperfections in circular cylindrical members is described, the method is simple to implement in a laboratory environment while providing accurate measurements. Numerical methods to process the measurements into three-dimensional imperfection maps are also presented along with an algorithm to distinguish between significant imperfection patterns and measurement ‘noise’. Results from a recent research project where this method has been used illustrate the derivations in this paper. 相似文献
On the 19 June 2001, a Thames passenger/tour boat underwent several evacuation trials. This work was conducted in order to collect data for the validation of marine-based computer models. The trials involved 111 participants who were distributed throughout the vessel. The boat had two decks and two points of exit from the lower deck placed on either side of the craft, forward and aft. The boat had a twin set of staircases towards the rear of the craft, just forward of the rear exits. maritimeEXODUS was used to simulate the full-scale evacuation trials conducted. The simulation times generated were compared against the original results and categorised according to the exit point availability. The predictions closely approximate the original results, differing by an average of 6.6% across the comparisons, with numerous qualitative similarities between the predictions and experimental results. The maritimeEXODUS evacuation model was then used to examine the evacuation procedure currently employed on the vessel. This was found to have potential to produce long evacuation times. maritimeEXODUS was used to suggest modifications to the mustering procedures. These theoretical results suggest that it is possible to significantly reduce evacuation times. 相似文献
