AN INTELLIGENT SCENARIO GENERATOR FOR STRATEGIC BUSINESS PLANNING

This paper proposes a new area for neural networks application, that o f scenario generation. It describes an intelligent scenario generator which has been developed as a software tool to automatically generate future scenarios for strategic business planning. The generator, which is based on the theory of neural networks and the theory of truth val ue flow inference, has the ability not only to learn but also to corre ct the experts through a learning process. It, therefore, overcomes th e weaknesses and limitations of the conventional methods for scenario generation such as BASICS which lacks learning ability and has to rely constantly on experts. Finally, a simple case study is also presented to demonstrate the generator. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.