Scenario search: finding diverse, plausible and comprehensive scenario sets for complex systems

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. ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION MAY 2025; FULL ARTICLE AVAILABLE SOON