Towards an Integrated Development and Sustainability Evaluation of Energy Scenarios Assisted by Automated Information Exchange.

Today, decision making in politics and businesses should aim for sustainable development, and one field of action is the transformation of energy systems. To reshape energy systems towards renewable energy resources, it has to be decided today on how to accomplish the transition. Energy scenarios are widely used to guide decision making in this context. While considerable effort has been put into developing energy scenarios, researchers have pointed out three requirements for energy scenarios that are not fulfilled satisfactorily yet: The development and evaluation of energy scenarios should (1) incorporate the concept of sustainability, (2) provide decision support in a transparent way, and (3) be replicable for other researchers. To meet these requirements, we combine different methodological approaches: story-and-simulation (SAS) scenarios, multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), information modeling, and co-simulation. We show how the combination of these methods can lead to an integrated approach for development and sustainability evaluation of energy scenarios assisted by automated information exchange. We concretize this approach with a sustainability evaluation process (SEP) model and an information model. We highlight, which artifacts are developed during the SEP and how the information model can help to automate the information exchange in this process. The objectives are to facilitate a sustainable development of the energy sector and to make the development and decision support processes of energy scenarios more transparent.