On Using Scenarios in the Evaluation of Complex Alternatives
Abstract
The deployment of large military (or social) systems will occur in an uncertain future, and decisions concerning the design of and choice among alternative systems must therefore involve projections of the expected outcomes of system deployment in such uncertain futures. An attempt to represent the large number of potential alternative futures using an event diagram will result in the bushy-mess problem, often encountered in applications of decision analytic techniques, in which the number of different branches in a probability (or decision) tree is prohibitively large. An alternative to attempting to exhaustively characterize the future in a system evaluation is to evaluate the alternative systems in a reasonable number of hypothetical scenarios. This report is intended as a general discussion of the problem of the use of such scenarios in system evaluation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1976
- Accession Number
- ADA035387
Entities
People
- Michael F. O'connor
- Ward Edwards