MODELING FINAL COSTS OF IRAQI PUBLIC SCHOOL PROJECTS USING NEURAL NETWORKS

The final cost of public school building projects, like other construction projects, is unknown to the owner till the account closure. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) is used in an attempt to predict the final cost of two story (12 classes) school projects under lowest bid system of award before work starts. A database of (65) school projects records completed in (2007-2012) are used to develop and verify the ANN model. Based on expert o pinions, nine out of eleven parameters are considered to have the most significant impact on t he magnitude of final cost. Hence they are used as model inputs while the output of the model is going to be the final cost (FC).