Cost estimating using the computer models

Water and wastewater sector is considered one of the most vital sectors in anycountry because of its services to the whole society. It is considered the basis for anyreconstruction and economic developments. This becomes clear from taking manyparameters of infrastructure as a measure of the advancement of nations. Water andwastewater sector is considered one of the infrastructure parts.Urban Authorities in most countries try to achieve the maximum level of thebasic services to its citizens, especially in infrastructure sector. In achieving this goal,the government expends a lot of money on establishing the projects that provide theseservices.The current procedures for formulating the FYP depend on collecting theneeded projects from the Governorates and NOPW ASD in one proposed plan. TheMOP identifies the amount of fund available. The NOPWASD starts eliminating someprojects until the total cost of the remaining projects is less than or equal to theavailable fund. There is no clear system that can collect the data about the neededprojects with the same level of information, determine the relative priority of theneeded projects, and rank the needed projects. Also, there is no system that can enterthe available funds, select the projects whose total costs are within the available funds,and study different strategies during the plan formulation.The objective of this study is to develop a system for preparing the FYP forthe water and wastewater sector. The system is amid to achieve the national goalsthrough the best usage of the available funds, within the imposed constraints. In thissystem the selection of projects is made using two different approaches: Desiredselection technique and proposed selection model.The proposed system was computerized using the Visual Basic language,which gives the planner more flexibility in studying different strategies during the FYPformulation. Two case studies were used to test the applicability of the proposedsystem.