Towards Agent-Based Scenario Development for Strategic Decision Support

Abstract

Scenario planning is a method for learning about the future by understanding the nature and impact of the most uncertain and important driving forces affecting that future. However, most scenarios, being mostly stories, lack validation, dynamism and fail to acknowledge all relations between actors, activities and resources. In this paper, we propose an agent-based model for scenario development that tackles these problems by specifying scenarios as agent organizations which makes possible the representation of the global organization strategy, and global goals together with the objectives and requirements of different stakeholders. As a concrete example of agent-based scenario planning, the OperA model for agent organizations is used to create a model scenario for NedTrain, a rolling stock maintenance provider in the Netherlands.