Multi-criteria mapping and prioritization of Arctic and North Atlantic maritime safety and security needs

This paper details a methodology for the mapping and prioritization of needs for research and innovation across a multi-disciplinary topic area. The methodology is applied to needs arising from the field of Arctic maritime safety and security, in order to provide a roadmap for an ongoing multi-national European Union (EU) funded research project. A needs hierarchy containing topics, needs and sub-needs is first formed by utilization of multiple sources including facilitated stakeholder workshops, literature review and semi-structured questionnaires. A further round of stakeholder opinion is then sought in order to ascertain the importance and level of challenge involved in solving each identified sub-need. This information is utilized to form a PICK (Possible, Implement, Challenge, Keep Back) chart in order to visualize and categorize the sub-needs. A goal programming knapsack model is formulated to select a set of priority needs that satisfy goals relating to the maximization of overall importance, the balance between topics at the first level of the need hierarchy and the balance between more challenge (for longer term research) and implement (for shorter term implementation) needs. Sensitivity analysis is conducted around the number of chosen projects and the goal programming weights. Conclusions are hence drawn with respect to the methodology and the Arctic maritime safety and security field of application.