Abstract
Over the last decades, the more the population grew, the more the demand increased for marine space uses. Hence, the increasing demand has led to conflicts due to the overlapping of various human activities (e.g., renewable energy equipment, aquaculture, fishing, etc.) occurred for economic development, social objectives, and environmental protection purposes (European Commission of Maritime Affairs, 2017). To urgently address these potential conflicts, a planning approach is required to analyze and allocate the spatial and temporal distribution of human activities in marine areas [1]. This planning process is usually called Marine Spatial Planning (MSP), an ecosystem-based spatial organization process that aims at allocating marine spatial zones to multiple actors to ensure that human activities at sea take place in an efficient, safe and sustainable manner [2].
The goal of this contribution is twofold: 1) Proposing a practical description of MSP and a comprehensive review of related articles, and 2) Developing a spatial decision support system to allocate maritime space to multiple actors, in which actors interact/negotiate and seek compromises, in order to reach an agreement despite their potentially conflicting objectives/constraints