28th International Congress on project Management "Project Management in the Digital Decade"

Roads have a significant contribution to social progress and economic growth. Decision-making on the investments in road infrastructure projects is based on cost estimation. Although the introduction of digitalization revolutionized the cost estimation process and brought increased accuracy, reliability, and efficiency, recent studies show that cost estimates are still a challenging problem. In this paper, a literature review was conducted in order to review the existing digitalized approaches for cost estimation of road infrastructure projects and to analyze their basic elements, properties, and techniques. It was concluded that ML methods are widely used in developing cost estimation models, where the most common method is ANN. The implementation of digital tools, such as BIM and GIS, in the cost estimation of road infrastructure projects enables automation and real-time collaboration between stakeholders which encourages better communication and coordination leading to reduced errors. Their implementation also provides decision-makers with cost comparisons between alternative routes. It was concluded that the significant challenges faced in digitalization in cost estimation of road infrastructure projects are the quality and availability of data and the lack of skilled and trained personnel.