AI-Simulated Expert Panels for Socio-Technical Scenarios and Decision Guidance

TL;DR

This paper presents an AI-driven framework that simulates expert panels to generate, analyze, and select socio-technical transition pathways, enhancing efficiency and diversity in scenario planning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel AI-based expert simulation and decision support system for socio-technical scenario analysis, addressing resource and diversity limitations of traditional methods.

Findings

Successfully applied to Germany's energy transition as a proof of concept.

Enables rapid, structured expert elicitation and policy stress-testing.

Provides an alternative or supplement to conventional scenario generation.

Abstract

Socio-technical scenarios for net-zero and other transformation pathways combine qualitative storylines with quantitative models, embedding them in plausible societal contexts for model assessment. Conventional scenario generation is resource-intensive, can be limited in internal consistency and diversity of expert and stakeholder perspectives, and is rarely stress-tested. This paper introduces a synthetic, AI-based expert panel to address these bottlenecks. An AI model first simulates domain experts who agree on descriptors, states, and their interactions. A probabilistic Cross-Impact Balance analysis then generates internally consistent pathways, using stochastic shocks to assess robustness and pathway diversity. An AI stakeholder panel uses multi-criteria decision analysis to select a preferred pathway; an AI expert panel translates it into model-ready quantitative inputs. Although scalable and applicable to any other country or region, the framework is applied to Germany's energy transition as a proof of concept, and offers an alternative and/or supplement to scenario generation. Furthermore, it enables Virtual AI-Led Decision Laboratories for exploratory policy stress-testing and provides an approach for rapid, structured expert elicitation and decision support in other domains.