Design of an Algorithm for Rapid Estimation of the Unit Cost of Concrete in Construction Projects

The estimation of the concrete unit cost in construction engineering plays a vital role in controlling construction costs and ensuring timely project completion. To achieve this, a fast estimation algorithm for concrete unit costs is proposed. To ensure accurate estimation and reduce the computational burden on the convolutional neural network (CNN) for rapid estimation, the factors influencing concrete costs are identified and arranged using the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) method. The factors affecting the concrete unit cost of high-rise construction are selected as the input data sequence for the CNN model. The feature map of the input data is extracted through the convolution layer. After applying the pooling operation to the feature map, the processed data is passed into the fully connected layer through the final pooling layer, where the final calculation is performed to obtain the estimated concrete unit cost. Experimental results indicate that to ensure fast convergence and minimize estimation errors in CNN estimation, optimal network parameters are determined through multiple experiments. The best configuration includes a [Formula: see text] convolution kernel and 11 convolutional cores. This algorithm, which uses the ISM method to select influential factors, achieves high accuracy in estimating the concrete unit cost. In actual engineering applications, the error between the estimated and actual results is minimal, with a maximum difference of only 1 yuan.