Scenario Management: Process and Support

Scenario planning is a widely accepted management tool for decision support activities. Scenario planning, development, organisation, analysis, and evaluation are generally quite complex processes. Systems that purport to support these processes are complex and difficult to use and do not fully support all phases of scenario management. Though traditional Decision Support Systems (DSS) provide strong database, modelling and visualisation capabilities for the decision maker they do not explicitly support scenario management well. This paper presents an integrated life cycle approach for scenario driven flexible decision support. The proposed processes help the decision maker with idea generation, scenario planning, development, organisation, analysis, and execution. We also propose a generalised scenario evaluation process that allows homogeneous and heterogeneous scenario comparisons. This research develops a domain independent, component-based, modular framework and architecture that support the proposed scenario management process. The framework and architecture have been validated through a concrete