Civil engineers are often in the firing line for alleged cost overruns, particularly on major
publicly funded infrastructure projects. This usually occurs when the final cost of a project is
simply compared with the original estimate, even though this was published a long time ago,
in different circumstances and for a quite different project to the one carried out. This paper
proposes a systematic approach to ensure that cost overruns, should they occur, are more
accurately defined in terms of when the initial and end costs are assessed, from which point …