Nearly one-half of all construction projects exceed planned costs and schedule, globally [1]. Owners and construction managers can analyze historical project performance data to inform cost and schedule overrun risk-reduction strategies. Though, the majority of open-source project datasets are limited by the number of projects, data dimensionality, and location. A significant global customer of the construction industry, the Department of Defense (DoD) maintains a vast database of historical project data that can be used to determine the sources and magnitude of construction schedule and cost overruns for many continental and international locations. The selection of data provided by the authors is a subset of the U.S. Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation (FPDS-NG), which stores contractual obligations made by the U.S. Federal Government [2]. The data comprises more than ten fiscal years (1 Oct 2009 - 04 June 2020) of construction contract attributes that will enable researchers to investigate spatiotemporal schedule and cost performance by, but not limited to: contract type, construction type, delivery method, award date, and award value. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the most extensive open-source dataset of its kind, as it provides access to the contract data of 132,662 uniquely identified construction projects totaling $865 billion. Because the DoD's facilities and infrastructure construction requirements and use of private construction firms are congruent with the remainder of the public sector and the private sector, results obtained from analyses of this dataset may be appropriate for broader application.
Keywords: Construction; Contract; Cost; Data; Delay; Department of defense; Growth; Overrun; Schedule.