On the Edge of Human Computation: Interactive Parametric Estimating Paradigm
Jing Du, Rui Liu · Computing in Civil and Building Engineering (2014) · 2014
Conceptual estimating in the proposal development is nontrivial and continues to be challenged by quality- and efficiency-related issues. As a remedy, parametric estimating is widely used. Despite the merits obtained, human involvement is always missing from the decision-making process. Information can hardly flow between different sources of opinions. This paper introduces an innovative paradigm that combines the intelligence of human beings and computational ability of computers. It smoothes the information flow in the mixture of human-network and computer-network, solicits and conserves knowledge and experience of estimators in the proposal development. A tool based on the proposed paradigm is developed named Interactive Parametric Estimating Tool (iPET). iPET was tested in the proposal development of a power plant project. Results show that the proposed paradigm enables fast and intelligent collaborative solution-seeking between estimators and computers while highlighting the role of estimators. This work offers a unique perspective to the estimators to envision and refine their work.