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We propose an innovative method for temporal analysis of integrated environmental scenarios aimed at supporting policy making for sustainable innovation. This requires the study of possible effects of low-carbon policies on the society and, hence, copying with a multi-disciplinary domain. In fact scenarios represent possible future states of the world under plausible conditions and different assumptions, evaluated under various perspectives, such as: energy, environment, economy and societal system. Scenarios are usually produced by independent tools (e.g., TIMES, GAINS and the Social Accounting Matrix), and once they are integrated, there is a need for new analysis techniques to cope with the complexity of synthetizing possible behaviors of the whole system from a significant number of variables of different nature. We propose a framework to enable execution of temporal queries over a repository of integrated scenarios. As far as we know, this type of analysis is new in this multi-disciplinary sector. Temporal scenario queries aim at detecting specified behaviour(s) for the system over time and, hence, at verifying that temporal properties hold. An example of temporal query involving environmental and economical variables is: “Select those scenarios such that if gdp increases some time in the future without that CO2 price has increased, then follows a time period where CO2 emissions increase”. A preliminary set of queries inspired by temporal formulas from the Linear Temporal Logic were defined by field experts and used in a preliminary experimentation to demonstrate the applicability and the scalability of the approach.

We propose the TEMPORANA framework foranalysis of integrated scenarios aiming at studying the possibleeffects on the society of sustainable innovation policies. Theframework consists of a set of advanced temporal queries forscenario analysis and a software application. Integrated scenariosare possible future states of different aspects of the world(e.g., energy, environment, technology, economy, societal system) representing plausible conditions under different assumptions. Temporal scenario queries aim at detecting a specified behaviorfor the system over time and, hence, at verifying that a temporalproperty holds. A preliminary set of queries, each involving onetemporal operator from the Linear Temporal Logic, were definedby field experts and used in a preliminary experimentation todemonstrate the applicability of the approach. © 2016 IEEE.