Electricity Consumption Prediction in an Electronic System Using Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

The tremendous rise of electrical energy demand worldwide has led to many problems related to efficient use of electrical energy, consequently posing difficult challenges to electricity consumers of all levels—from households to large companies’ facilities. Most of these challenges could be overcome by the accurate prediction of electricity demand. Additionally, balance responsibility includes the penalty-based financial mechanism causing extra expense for badly estimated consumption, above the allowed imbalance limits. In this paper, a method for electricity consumption prediction based on artificial neural networks is proposed. The electricity consumption dataset is obtained from a cold storage facility, which generates data in hourly intervals. The data obtained are measured for a period of over 2 years and then separated to four seasons, so different models are developed for each season. Five different network structures (ordinary RNN, LSTM, GRU, bidirectional LSTM, bidirectional GRU) for five different values of horizon, i.e., input data (one day, two days, four days, one week, two weeks) are examined. Performance indices, such as mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE) and mean square error (MSE), are used in order to obtain qualitative and quantitative comparisons among the obtained models. The results show that the modifications of recurrent neural networks perform much better than ordinary recurrent neural networks. GRU and LSTMB structures with horizons of 168h and 336h are found to have the best performances.