Cost Estimator

Novapoint Cost Estimator, further called Cost Estimator, is a program made for cost estimating investment projects within the road infrastructure industry specifically, but is suitable for any investment project that needs to handle uncertainty and risks.

The process and calculation method used is based on the successive principle as first defined by Dr. Steen Lichtenberg. Here's how Dr. Steen Lichtenberg¹⁾ defines it:

The estimation process is group based, where a key feature is to let a balanced group of key persons conduct a few analysis sessions together, during which they identify and then organize all possible sources of uncertainty including fuzzy ones. They then operate top-down, systematically detailing and evaluating the most important issues in successive steps. The analysis group performs non-biased subjective evaluations of their impact on the result, currently producing a top ten list of the most critical remaining sources of uncertainty. This allows the participants to keep an overview throughout the process, to focus on the really important aspects and to avoid wasting resources on the many issues of little or no importance. Another important feature is the arranging of all uncertainties into discrete statistically independent elements and then working with the conditional uncertainty* of each of the elements. This allows simple yet sufficiently accurate statistical calculations.

Cost Estimator is meant to be a complete tool for both handling project information, process information, large-scale project evaluations, the cost estimate itself, and conclusions. When finished, a number of reports can be extracted, meant to fully cover all necessary information from the estimation process, so that it should be no need for adding information using word processors or spreadsheets. This means that the single dataset can be stored, knowing that all information is available for later use.

Cost Estimator is owned by the Norwegian Road Authorities. Cost Estimator was developed from ground-up in 2008-2009 by Vianova Systems AS, as a replacement of earlier versions. Cost Estimator is technically based on Novapoint application platform, also called DCM-technology. This platform is further build on Microsoft Windows® .NET regarding user interface, while the underlying model and storage system Quadri™ is based on Norwegian National Road Data Bank (NVDB). This means that the information created using Cost Estimator are modeled as objects (features) that may be added to NVDB.

Novapoint Cost Estimator works as a separate windows program - only dependent of Microsoft Word for printing reports.

Cost Estimator is released in a Norwegian version at the end of 2009.