Abstract. Precision agriculture (PA) is defined as an agricultural management based on the observation, measurement, and response of a set quantitative qualitative variables that affects production. The first step in approach to precision is, therefore, acquisition collection data from optical, multispectral, geophysical sensors, etc. aimed at obtaining knowledge monitoring crop. In recent year...

Projects require budgets to set the sponsor’s financial commitment and provide the basis for cost control and measurement of cost performance. A key component of a project budget is cost contingency. This paper reviews the traditional approach of estimating project cost contingency by means of a percentage addition to the base estimate and analyses its many conceptual flaws. Over the past decad...

Concurrent engineering environments affect the cost estimating and engineering capability of an organisation. Cost estimating tools become outdated and need changing in order to reflect the new environment. This is essential, since cost estimating is the start of the cost management process and influences the ‘go’, ‘no go’ decisions concerning a new product development. This paper examines both...

Contingency is a ubiquitous component of project cost estimating. This paper provides a review of the literature pertaining to the estimating of project cost contingency. It describes the flaws of the tradition percentage method for estimating project cost contingency and sets out more robust estimation methods regression analysis, Monte Carlo simulation and artificial neutral networks. In part...

This paper revisits the problem of estimating ex ante cost functions previously studied by Pope and Just (1996) and Moschini (2001). An ex ante cost function that generalizes their ex ante cost functions is introduced, and an econometric procedure for estimating a flexible approximation to it is developed. That generalized cost function is economically relevant not only for the Just and Pope (1...