Fuzzy linguistic multicriteria morphological analysis in scenario planning

Companies that want to be competitive must make use of good practices to anticipate the future by analyzing the possible effects of today's decisions on their own long-term development. Scenario planning is among the most extended approaches to accomplish this. One of the techniques often used in scenario planning is Morphological Analysis, which aims to explore the space of feasible futures in a systematic way by analyzing all the combinations of the possible states of the variable that compose the system under study. Each of this combinations represent a possible future scenario. This work focuses on a particular variant known as the MORPHOL method, in which every scenario is evaluated in terms of the probability it eventually arises. This is computed using the marginal probability estimates of the hypothetical variables' states involved in the scenario, which are given by human experts. This method presents two drawbacks: first, the probabilities have to be expressed by numerical values which makes difficult its estimation by humans and does not capture its uncertainty; and second, it examines the scenarios basing only on their probability, thus it may ignore scenarios that are interesting but not the very probable. In order to ease the experts' task and capture their opinions in a better way, we introduce Computing with Words techniques. For solving the second shortcoming, we apply Multi-criteria Decision Making to uncover good scenarios according to several criteria jointly including probability. The result is a novel linguistic multi-criteria method for morphological analysis that has been successfully applied to a real problem and thus deserves further research.