An Artificial Neural System to Predict Building Demolition Cost

Cost estimation of building demolition, like any engineering project, requires ample amount of time and experience to accomplish since it involves calculations of complex relationships between its influencing factors. Since artificial neural networks (ANNs) are known to be effective in the cost-forecasting domain with complex parameters involve, the study aims to develop an ANN that can predict building demolition cost in Quezon City. One-hundred demolition projects from the Department of Building Official in Quezon City were gathered, evaluated and divided randomly into two sets: 90% for training, validation and internal testing and 10% for external application. Nine demolition cost-influencing factors were identified, namely: building condition, materials and classification, number of floors, total floor area, site accessibility, location, demolition methods used and debris removal options. The training was applied with feedforward backpropagation algorithm. The resulting architecture for the selected ANN model consists of 12 hidden nodes. The model tested and was successful in predicting demolition cost in Quezon City with an average accuracy rating of 90.21%.