Electricity supply chain hybrid long‐term demand forecasting approach based on deep learning—a case study of basic metals industry

Abstract

AbstractDemand forecasting is a key parameter to achieve optimal supply chain management at different levels. The basic metals industry is one of the most energy‐intensive industries in the electricity supply chain. The impossibility of large‐scale energy storage, reservation constraints, and its high costs, limitations on electricity transmission lines capacity, real‐time response to high priority strategic demands, and variety of energy rates at different hours and seasons are issues that challenge the electricity supply chain. A hybrid approach is presented in this paper to improve the accuracy of long‐term demand forecasting in the electricity supply chain. The proposed approach uses wavelet decomposition and long short‐term memory (LSTM) neural networks to produce new predictors for demand forecasting in case of defective data. The data used in this study consists of the recorded hourly demand of Espidan Iron Stone (EIS) company and data of Mobarakeh Steel (MS) company in Isfahan Province. The understudy time series includes a lot of interruptions due to non‐production of the factory or power outages and spikes which cause uncertainty that makes the forecasting more difficult in comparison with continuous time series. Multiple machine learning models including decision trees (DTs), boosted and bagged trees (BGTs), support vector regression (SVR) models, extreme learning machines (ELMs), and a LSTM neural network model are employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in this paper. A comparison of the results obtained using the hybrid proposed approach and training machine learning (ML) methods shows a notable reduction in forecasting error.