Integration of Decision Analysis and Scenario Planning for Coastal Engineering and Climate Change

This paper develops a methodology for eliciting shifts in preference across future scenarios in the performance assessment of infrastructure policies and investments. The methodology quantifies the robustness of alternative portfolios across a variety of scenarios and identifies the scenarios that greatly affect the assessments. An innovation of the methodology is to elicit, for each scenario, only a few relative increases or decreases in importance of selected terms of the value function, which is more efficient than a full elicitation of the value function for each scenario. The identification of critical scenarios via our methodology can be used to focus resource-intensive and potentially costly modeling activities. The methodology integrates preference orders, centroid weights, and the Borda method. In a demonstration, the methodology assesses the relative sea level and other climate-change scenarios that could affect the performance of coastal protections.