Generative AI-assisted Participatory Modeling in Socio-Environmental Planning under Deep Uncertainty

Socio-environmental planning under deep uncertainty requires researchers to identify and conceptualize problems before exploring policies and deploying plans. In practice and model-based planning approaches, this problem conceptualization process often relies on participatory modeling to translate stakeholders' natural-language descriptions into a quantitative model, making this process complex and time-consuming. To facilitate this process, we propose a templated workflow that uses large language models for an initial conceptualization process. During the workflow, researchers can use large language models to identify the essential model components from stakeholders' intuitive problem descriptions, explore their diverse perspectives approaching the problem, assemble these components into a unified model, and eventually implement the model in Python through iterative communication. These results will facilitate the subsequent socio-environmental planning under deep uncertainty steps. Using ChatGPT 5.2 Instant, we demonstrated this workflow on the lake problem and an electricity market problem, both of which demonstrate socio-environmental planning problems. In both cases, acceptable outputs were obtained after a few iterations with human verification and refinement. These experiments indicated that large language models can serve as an effective tool for facilitating participatory modeling in the problem conceptualization process in socio-environmental planning.