Cost-Weighted TF-IDF: A Novel Approach for Measuring Highway Project Similarity Based on Pay Items’ Cost Composition and Term Frequency
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 149, Issue 8
Abstract
State highway agencies (SHAs) often need to cluster or bundle projects in accordance with their scope similarity for various construction management tasks, including historical data-driven time, cost estimating, and project bundling. Conventionally, SHAs categorize similar projects into work types based on subjective judgment about the similarity between major pay items. A few quantitative methods for project similarity determination are found in the literature, but they mostly use one single source of information, either the cost contribution of pay items or the keywords of pay items descriptions, for measuring project similarity. This paper presents the first attempt to integrate multiple information sources for project similarity measurement. This research proposes a novel cost-weighted term frequency-inverse document frequency (CW-TF-IDF) method that incorporates the cost information of pay items into the traditional TF-IDF word embedding method to measure project similarity. The effectiveness of the proposed method in supporting project clustering and bundling was tested using the historical bid data collected from an SHA. The findings showed that the CW-TF-IDF method significantly improves project clustering performance compared to the most recent state-of-the-art method. The CW-TF-IDF method also showed its outperformance in project bundling as it yielded a cosine similarity of over 0.9 for most of the bundled projects in the testing data. This proposed method is expected to help SHAs accurately identify similar projects and eventually improve their project management effectiveness.
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Data Availability Statement
The data used during the study were provided by a third party. Direct requests for these materials may be made to the provider as indicated in the Acknowledgments. Some models or codes that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge that the Iowa Department of Transportation provided the bid tabulation data for this study.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 149 • Issue 8 • August 2023
Copyright
© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 13, 2022
Accepted: Apr 3, 2023
Published online: Jun 6, 2023
Published in print: Aug 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Nov 6, 2023
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Bibliographies
- Business management
- Construction costs
- Construction engineering
- Construction industry
- Construction management
- Continuum mechanics
- Dynamics (solid mechanics)
- Engineering fundamentals
- Engineering mechanics
- Highway and road management
- Highway transportation
- Information management
- Infrastructure
- Infrastructure construction
- Management methods
- Motion (dynamics)
- Natural frequency
- Oscillations
- Practice and Profession
- Project management
- Solid mechanics
- Transportation engineering
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