I would like for scenario names to be prefixed with a built-in ID number, in the same way that model commits have official version numbers, and wastewater and trade waste profiles have ID numbers. ICM clearly tracks ID numbers behind the scenes, since it is able to keep the scenarios in the same order (rather than sorting them alphabetically or similar).
When specifying exactly which 'model' was used to produce a set of simulation results, it is necessary to specify network ID, version ID and scenario ID - so it would be helpful to be able to just point to a scenario based on its ID number, rather than its name or manually counting which scenario it is.
This does become a bit more complicated since scenarios can be deleted, so if for example there are ten scenarios, and the fourth one is deleted, then if a new scenario is created, there is no clear answer if the new scenario would get ID number 11 or 4 (since 4 is now 'available' again. In order to avoid confusion with previous model versions, my preference would be for old, deleted scenario numbers to not be reused. This would also be consistent with how database object ID numbers work, since these just count incrementally upwards, but never re-use IDs from deleted objects.
Attached is a screenshot of the current model I am working on - I have manually added the scenario ID at the start of each scenario. This makes identifying them so much easier - e.g. I can just say "ID1281941v18s16" and this point to exactly which model network, version and scenario I am talking about.
Fully agree with this idea. Not having ID numbers for scenarios was a weakness which we identified early on so we require users to number them s1, s2, s3. It is an easy to read prefix to the scenario. We have latterly required that scenarios number are not re-used so if (say) s2 is deleted it should never be used again.