Who Risks and Wins?—Simulated Cost Variance in Sustainable Construction Projects

More and more construction projects are closed before they ever start. Among the most significant reasons for project failures is cost risk. Construction companies have many problems with reliable cost management. Rising demands of the key market players insist on making construction projects more sustainable according to the simultaneous improvement of the economic, environmental and social responsiveness dimensions. In order to investigate these problems, a four-phase research methodology has been followed consisting of: (1) literature review to identify research trends and gaps, (2) survey to construction experts to detect their subjective perspectives about risk costs and analyse the corresponding costs structure for the investment in sustainable projects, (3) simulations based on Monte Carlo simulation with an author’s methodology for calculating the cost risk with an additional statistical analysis, (4) ending questionnaire to obtain the final feedback from the experts and the validation of obtained results. A contribution to the development of knowledge about cost risk is the observation that the changing probability distributions of individual cost-generating components may include both economic as well as technological and organizational aspects. Thus, with the proposed approach, often complex, global challenges of sustainable construction projects can be tackled in an accessible way.