A data-driven knowledge-based system with reasoning under uncertain evidence for regional long-term hourly load forecasting

Abstract

Reliable long-term hourly load forecasting is imperative for electricity utilities and planners' decision-making, especially in generation-transmission expansion planning. This paper develops a data-driven knowledge-based system for regional hourly load forecasting in the long-term horizon with contributions in both knowledge base and inference engine. In this regard, in the knowledge base, two types of driving factors are taken into account to determine the forecasting model: long-term trend-related features such as macro-economic factors and short-term factors such as temperature. The knowledge base is decomposed into three-step-related parts to deal with these groups' substantial differences in frequency. Firstly, the long-term trends are identified by the tendency variables. Then, the short-term variability is considered by temperature-related variables in addition to day type. Machine learning regression methods, support vector machines, random forest, and artificial neural networks are compared to determine the non-linear relationship of variables in these steps. The results of these steps are combined in the third step. Then, in the inference engine, a new reasoning method based on fuzzy logic is represented to forecast the regional long-term hourly load under uncertain evidence of temperature as an effective non-predictable feature in the long run. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, a comparison against five systems is conducted. The results show the superiority of this system compared to the other systems for a publicly available dataset (ISO New England electricity market) as well as Iran’s residential, commercial and agricultural electricity load.