This paper highlights the strategic importance of the cost estimation of building refurbishment work and the need for IT tools to support managers in their decisions to go for refurbishment or redevelopment. An investigation amongst the North West councils has confirmed this need and has shown that the domain is too complex to design an expert system using model-based reasoning (MBR). As a result, an expert system (CBRefurb) which estimates the cost of refurbishing buildings and provides decision support for construction managers is designed. This system is being implemented using a relatively new paradigm called Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). CBR is chosen for several reasons. The complexity and the uncertainty that characterise building refurbishment makes it difficult to estimate the costs using model-based reasoning. In addition, since refurbishment estimators use previous similar work to produce estimates it is an ideal problem for CBR.

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