Budget estimating models for the construction cost of public school buildings in Saudi Arabia

The Saudi Government encourages pre-college education and allocates a generous part of its budget every year for enhancing its quality and for making it available for all citizens. The Ministry of Education implements the governmental policy towards educations and builds hundreds of schools every year. In order to build these schools, the Ministry of Education has to prepare the needed budget and submit it to the Ministry of Finance for its approval. The submitted budget has to be accurate enough to prevent problems associated with underestimation or overestimation of the project cost, such as cancellation of the project at an intermediate stage or building the project below the desired standards. So, in order to help the Ministry of Education to prepare a reliable cost estimate for its school projects and achieve its predetermined plans, this research was conducted. In this research, an identification and evaluation of the budget estimating method currently used by the Ministry of Education were carried out.;This evaluation process revealed major strengths and weaknesses of the system. In order to upgrade such a system, mathematical models were developed. These mathematical models were designed to produce the budget estimate at the conceptual stage when only little information are available about the project. The predictability of the developed models was checked and found to produce better estimates than those produced by the current estimating method used by the Ministry of Education. Moreover, the outputs of the developed mathematical models were checked and found to comply with the accuracy range recommended by the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE).