A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1991

In a developing country like Nepal, where in most cases the projects are externally financed, there is still the overiding tendency to overemphasise the minimisation of construction costs in a highway project. But the cost estimates to be used at the earlier stage of design, where only a limited data will be available for analysis, have usually been based on lump sum unit costs derived from historic data on similar schemes, which often may not give a satisfactory result. A generalised model is hence analysed which could be used for any part of the country in any topographical conditions to estimate the construction cost for a highway project at the route location stage with the constraints of Nepal Road Standards and current practice. The model basically consists of three parts for the estimation of earthwork cost, retaining wall cost and the bridge cost respectively. Each part of the model is independent to each other and hence can also be used independently. The basic input data required is the general topographical information of the area concerned in terms of topographical contoured maps. The model assumes a predetermined horizontal alignment and the centre line profile of the ground surf ace has to be prepared at around 1:10000 horizontal and 1:2000 vertical scale. The results obtained were satisfactory and hence can be used to estimate the parameters successfully. The estimate tested was well within the accuracy desired at the earlier stage of design and the statistical test on the accuracy of the mode l shows a satisfactory result.