SuretyAssist: Fuzzy expert system to assist surety underwriters in evaluating construction contractors for bonding

In construction, many owners mitigate the risk of unforeseen contractor default by accepting only bonded contractors who must endure a rigorous evaluation process by surety brokers and surety underwriters. This evaluation process includes a financial analysis and a review of work on hand and past performance, all of which have reliable structured methods for their evaluation. Additionally, a number of subjective criteria are considered that are more difficult to capture and assess objectively but which can be modeled effectively using fuzzy logic. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how fuzzy logic and expert systems can be combined to provide a structured approach to evaluating contractors for surety underwriting purposes. Fuzzy logic is used to model both the objective and subjective factors considered in contractor evaluation using linguistic terms, and expert rules are used to capture the surety experts' reasoning process. A fuzzy expert system, SuretyAssist, is presented that can be used to provide an initial evaluation of general contractors as well as periodic reviews to determine whether or not to accept them as clients for bonding. SuretyAssist was validated using 31 actual cases of contractor evaluation and found to be accurate in 81% of the cases.