Over the last years, the problem of overlapping territorial claims between
different countries have become more acute in many regions.
Potential prospects of areas exploitation (e.g. natural resources) or
their location (e.g. important sea routes) have led to some potential tensions
or even conflicts between interested parties which, in turn, create
serious damage to the environment in the region, countries’ economies
and their inhabitants. Thus, there is a strong need to find some fair
and peaceful resolution of these competing territorial claims. We consider
the areas allocation problem from the mathematical point of view.
Based on introduced model of utility values with respect to main resources
and preferences of interested countries over disputed areas, we
proposed several models of areas allocation. Two main approaches are
used - each territory is allocated to a single country, and each territory
can be allocated to several countries - so called shared allocation. To
test the proposed models, we have also applied them to the problem
of areas allocation in Barents Sea and other regions of the Arctic. As
a result, we proposed several allocation scenarios and evaluated total
dissatisfaction level of each interested party. We consider our work as
an exercise to attract an attention of decision-making authorities since
we strongly believe that such models and evaluations based on them
can be helpful for the process of corresponding decision making
