Preliminary Site Selection for Floating Offshore Wind Farm Using Multi-method GIS-MCDM: A Malaysia EEZ Case Study

Malaysia’s Exclusive Economic Zone offers promising conditions for preliminary floating offshore wind farm. To identify these promising locations this study combines a PRISMA-guided review of GIS-based multi-criteria decision-making offshore wind siting research and a case study that implements an evidence-based, multi-method GIS-MCDM workflow. The review identifies prevailing criteria families, common GIS processing architectures, and emerging robustness practices. Guided by these findings, suitability mapping is performed using ERA5 wind and wave reanalysis over 2005–2024. National level screening identifies the most wind-viable corridor offshore Sabah, where suitability is evaluated on a harmonized ~ 1 km grid using seven selection (resource, bathymetry, slope, extreme-wave proxy, and infrastructure proximity) and three restriction factors (shipping, marine protected areas, and coastal setback). Robustness is assessed through dual weighting (AHP and CRITIC) and three ranking methods (TOPSIS, VIKOR, and PROMETHEE II), producing six suitability surfaces. A consensus surface is derived using the geometric mean to identify method-robust hotspots. High-suitability zones consistently cluster in the northern Sabah corridor, yielding a robust candidate area of approximately 6,458 km² near Kudat. Indicative energy estimate based on the consensus surface suggests substantial planning-level potential, while highlighting the need for higher-resolution met-ocean data, seabed characterization, and detailed techno-economic assessment in subsequent work.