A Fuzzy Measure Based Approach to Scenario Evaluation

Scenario planning is a strategic planning tool in which alternative futures are explored and strategies are developed in accordance with these futures. Scenarios, which are combinations of factors relevant to the problem, represent alternative futures. As the number of factors increases, the number of scenarios increases exponentially. Thus, the scenario planning process becomes highly complex and it is hard to develop appropriate strategies up to the numerous scenarios. To handle this problem, various criteria are defined in the literature to measure the quality of the scenarios and reduce their number accordingly. However, in these studies, scenarios are evaluated with respect to each criterion separately and joint (i.e. interaction) effects of factors are ignored. To address these issues, this study proposes a fuzzy measure based approach to consider more than one criterion simultaneously and the interaction between factors. Accordingly, more effective solutions will be created in order to obtain a high quality and reliable scenario set to be transformed into strategies. The applicability and effectiveness of the suggested method are examined by an example.