An explorative approach to deriving future scenarios: A first comparison of the consistency matrix-based and the catalog-based approach to generating future scenarios

Abstract

The development of robust products, meaning products that are successful regardless of changes in the future, requires an assessment of possible futures. This makes it possible to adapt to negative and unexpected conditions or circumstances. For this reason, future scenarios are developed that reflect possible futures based on influencing factors and their alternative developments on the product or system. For each factor, multidimensional future projections can be found, which are then evaluated for consistency. Up to now, scenarios have been created using the scenario management approach, which is based on consistency assessment of future projections pairs of key factors, or morphological methods (e.g. field anomaly relaxation). Both approaches are based at least in part on a plausibility check. On the one hand this leads to a high expenditure of time in scenario management, and on the other hand morphological methods consider a limited number of factors, which reduces the future space and thus limits informative value of the scenarios. In this research contribution, an explorative approach to deriving future scenarios is proposed that integrates morphological elements into scenario management. This significantly reduces the time required to generate future scenarios without having to reduce the number of considered key factors. First, the proposed approach is described with a process model. Second, the proposed form of scenario generation, the catalog-based scenario generation, is compared with the previously used approach to scenario generation with regard to advantages and disadvantages. Finally, the suitability for PGE - product generation engineering projects is evaluated, in particular regarding replicability, comprehensibility, effort and the completeness of the described future space.This is done by conducting three structured expert interviews and two case studies. Thereby, scenarios are created with both approaches. The criteria to evaluate the approaches are defined by a panel of experts on PGE.