An Integral Approach to Sustainable Decision-Making within Maritime Spatial Planning—A DSC for the Planning of Anchorages on the Island of Šolta, Croatia

Abstract

The planning of nautical tourism development and especially, the planning of its supporting infrastructure development, is important topic of the maritime spatial planning. The focus of research is the integration of multicriteria analysis and stakeholders within concept modeling that will provide support to the spatial planning specialists in the design of plans related to the development of anchorage capacities for small vessels. It examines economic, environmental, ecological, social, and civil engineering concerns related to the use of coastal water. It is a complex and ill-defined civil engineering problem because of multiple stakeholders with diverse interests, numerous conflicting goals and criteria, huge quantities of information and data, limited resources, etc. The research is concentrated on an integral approach to sustainable decision-making within maritime spatial planning by the modeling decision support concept to the processes of identification, validation, comparison, and the selection of locations for anchorage construction, based on multicriteria methods, goal analysis, and the logic of the decision support system. The concept is tested on the island of Šolta, Croatia, and has been proven as being an applicable, consistent, efficient, and effective methodology for the planning of the anchorage locations.

A Multi-Criteria Decision Support Concept for Selecting the Optimal Contractor

“…Creating such operational synergies by strengthening PROMETHEE with AHP gives the robustness and consistency in the decision-making process of the DSC-CONT. This approach is preferred by the authors, based on their own experience with similar methodological approaches, but also because of the research of other authors [19,33,34,39,[41][42][43][44][55][56][57].…”

“…The proposed HGS procedure ensures insight into the definition of objectives (O) and criteria (C) of the defined main goal (MG). Since stakeholder relationships are not static, but on the contrary dynamic and in constant change [42], their attitudes and actions may change at different project stages, and endanger the overall performance of the project. Since the hierarchical goal structure procedure is an iterative process that ends when all stakeholders agree, the decision-maker can be sure that if the procedure is followed, all stakeholders' attitudes are embedded in the criteria, the objectives and the main goal.…”

“…In the last decades there have been a number of papers dealing with outranking methods in construction project management, focusing on AHP and/or PROMETHEE methods [24]. While some authors focused on the AHP method [25][26][27][28][29][30], the analytic network process [31] or PROMETHEE methods [20,[32][33][34][35][36][37] the important driver was given by [38] to use these methods in synergy to achieve the most in a multi-stakeholder environment [19,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. To tackle the problem of selecting an appropriate contractor, various authors approach the problem from the stakeholder point-of-view using the AHP or group AHP [21,29,30,31,46,47], while others consider the problem as an overall approach of managing stakeholders such as the multi-actor multi-criteria analysis methodology, i.e., MAMCA [19,39], or decision support concept, i.e., DSC [32,34,35,42].…”

Design of a Framework for Integrating Environmentally Sustainable Design Principles and Requirements in Train Modernization Projects

“…Secondly, the consideration of environmental design should also be reflected in the formulation of requirements and criteria that govern the design process of the modernized train. The integration of economic, environmental, ecological, and social factors in engineering decisions can be a complex and ill-defined endeavor because of conflicting goals and criteria [27]. As train modernization processes are already complex and constrained with respect to resources such as time, data, and knowledge, the integration of these environmental sustainability factors should be designed to be sufficiently easy-to-use to be considered in practice.…”

Business Improvement of Croatian Marinas (Case Studies Split and Opatija)

“…one of the biggest disadvantages of nautical tourism in Croatia is the insufficient number of berths (Jajac, Kilič and rogulj, 2018). italy, Spain, France and Greece are Croatia's main competitors:the first three have more berths and better infrastructure and superstructure than Croatia; Greece can compete with Croatia where natural resources and cultural and other assets are concerned, but not when it comes to the number of berths (Kovačić, Favro and Saftic, 2012).…”