Developing scenarios for future utility provision

The aim of this paper is to present methodology and the development of a software system for developing scenarios of future utility provision for a community or a single household. It is impossible to predict the future with a high level of certainty. If one person predicts future he/she is most likely wrong, if one million people predict the future one person among them is most likely to be right but we don't know who. In this paper, instead of predicting a particular path into the future we propose a systematic approach which facilitates generating scenarios for future utility provision. The approach is based on three fundamental constructs: 1) conceptualisation of a household/community from the perspective of utility provisions, 2) XML database which stores information about all products, services and corresponding technologies/devices, including future/emerging technologies/devices, 3) algorithms for processing the stored data aimed to generate solutions to utility service provision problems. The approach is illustrated on the case study, a community in Scotland.