Chemical process plant capital cost estimating by fuzzy matching

The meaning and importance of process development and capital cost estimation for chemical plants is explained. Traditional estimating methods for capital costs are discussed. A new approach of matching the known specifications of a proposed plant to those of operational plants, and then using the capital cost of the best match as the estimate for the new plant is described. The methodology used to determine the best match using fuzzy matching is explained. Results obtained using real plant cost data show that the new method is quick and gives smaller errors on average than conventional correlation-based methods. Possible improvements to the method are described