A system for early budgeting cost of highway maintenance In Malaysia

Abstract

This project presents the process of developing an expert system to make an early budgeting for the cost of highway maintenance in Malaysia. Based on interviews with department of public works (PWD) , there are several factors that cause the company fails to get a project or won the tender for highway maintenance work. The main factor is failing to properly estimate the maintenance cost of the highway. In order to properly estimate the cost of the highway, company shall have experience in highway maintenance and know the current rate of work. These requirement will be difficult to company that are still new. For the experienced company, the process of estimating the cost of highway maintenance however is a complicated and tedious work. So, to overcome this problem the goal of this project was to assist company in developing more realistic early budgeting cost of highway maintenance projects. The research involved conducting in-depth interviews with subject matter experts in highway maintenance , studying the knowledge of highway maintenance systems and cost in Malaysia and analyzing historical maintenance price records by the P.W.D and private sector . After this efforts have been done, a system will be developed using software tools to assist company in developing maintenance cost for a variety of typical highway maintenance activities. The report includes the user manual and documentation for a computer program, This system developed using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. The output provides a list of things to do with it cost and produce the total cost. So, this software will make process of early budgeting for highway maintenance cost in Malaysia become more simple and easier.