Forecasting of steel consumption with use of nearest neighbors method

In the process of building a steel construction, its design is usually commissioned to the design office. Then a quotation is made and the finished offer is delivered to the customer. Its final shape is influenced by steel consumption to a great extent. Correct determination of the potential consumption of this material most often determines the profitability of the project. Because of a long waiting time for a final project from the design office, it is worthwhile to pre-analyze the project’s profitability and feasibility using historical data on already realized orders. The paper presents an innovative approach to decision-making support in one of the Polish construction companies. The authors have defined and prioritized the most important factors that differentiate the executed orders and have the greatest impact on steel consumption. These are, among others: height and width of steel structure, number of aisles, type of roof, etc. Then they applied and adapted the method of k-nearest neighbors to the specificity of the discussed problem. The goal was to search a set of historical orders and find the most similar to the analyzed one. On this basis, consumption of steel can be estimated. The method was programmed within the EXPLOR application.