Scenario search: finding diverse, plausible and comprehensive scenario sets for complex systems
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Complex systems such as cities, energy grids, or the global climate have many plausible futures. Scenarios, or structured narratives of decision-relevant futures, are a common decision support tool for making the complexity and uncertainties of complex systems humanly interpretable. However, the effectiveness of scenario-based decision support depends in part on the usefulness of the selected scenarios. Here we show an optimization-based approach for generating scenarios that are specifically designed to be diverse, plausible, and comprehensive. We establish the advantages of our method by evaluating it against three previously proposed methods: scenario matrices, generic archetypes, and clustering. Our case study is Schelling’s segregation model, a tractable yet behaviorally rich simulation of a complex system. Our results show the proposed optimization-based approach can generate more diverse, plausible, and comprehensive scenarios than existing approaches. The resulting scenarios may provide a more insightful and robust basis for policy decisions, especially for complex systems with emergent behavior or where substantial uncertainties are present.
DOI: 10.18174/sesmo.18823
Authors: Patrick Steinmann, Judith Verstegen, George Van Voorn, Sabin Roman, Arend Ligtenberg
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4413661445