Smart cost estimation: Empirical case for extra-high voltage transmission towers

Nowadays, electricity has become an integral part of human lives. Most of our daily appliances, tools, and personal belongings are inseparable from electricity. To ensure a proper electricity distribution with an efficient transfer capability, Extra-High Voltage (EHV) transmission towers are needed. To design such a structure, it is of utmost importance to account for the cost of said tower. However, the process to estimate the cost of EHV transmission towers is both time-consuming and strenuous on human labor since a lot of consideration have to be taken. To overcome this, an imperative requirement exists for a prompt, precise, and automated tool to replace the existing manual cost estimation method. This research endeavor aims to craft a tool using support vector regression (SVR) with the capacity to prognosticate construction expenses for projects involving EHV transmission towers. The exploration of pertinent literature has enabled us to amass historical data and delineate the attributes essential for estimating costs linked to EHV transmission tower construction. The investigation delves into a comprehensive dataset spanning the past decade in Taiwan. Within this timeframe, 317 EHV transmission towers were erected between 2009 and 2019. However, 79 of these instances are excluded due to incomplete information, thereby yielding 238 viable datasets (comprising 75% of the overall total) to underpin the development of the SVR model. By configuring the parameters to C=0.2 and γ=0.1, followed by 5-fold cross-validation, the resultant SVR model attains a remarkable prediction accuracy of 97.91%, on average. As a result, the proposed SVR-based model can effectively and accurately predict the cost of constructing an EHV transmission tower project and reduce the time spent on estimation, thus contributing to the enhancement of the resilience and robustness of the transmission network system.