Tech Reports

ULCS-02-011

Formalizing Scenario Analysis

Peter McBurney and Simon Parsons


Abstract

We propose a formal treatment of scenarios in the context of a dialectical argumentation formalism for qualitative reasoning about uncertain propositions. Our formalism extends prior work in which arguments for and against uncertain propositions were presented and compared in interaction spaces called Agoras. We now define the notion of a scenario in this framework and use it to define a set of qualitative uncertainty labels for propositions across a collection of scenarios. This work is intended to lead to a formal, computational theory of scenarios and scenario analysis.

Keywords: Agora, Argumentation, Climate Change, Ensembles, Forecasting, Scenarios.

[Full Paper]