A novel clustering-enhanced adaptive artificial neural network model for predicting day-ahead building cooling demand

Abstract

To accurately predict hourly day-ahead building cooling demand, year-round historical weather profile needs to be evaluated. The daily weather profiles among different time periods result in various features of historical datasets. The different appropriate structure and parameters of artificial neural network models may be identified for training datasets with different features. In this study, a novel clustering-enhanced adaptive artificial neural network (C-ANN) model is proposed to forecast 24h-ahead building cooling demand in subtropical areas. The uniqueness of the proposed adaptive model is that k-means clustering is implemented to recognise representative patterns of daily weather profile and thus categorize the annual datasets into featuring clusters. Each cluster of the weather profile, along with the corresponding time variables and cooling demand, is adopted to train one ANN sub-model. The optimal structure and parameters of each ANN sub-model are selected according to its featuring training datasets; thus the ANN sub-models are adaptive. The proposed C-ANN model is tested on a representative office building in Hong Kong. It is found that the mean absolute percentage error of the training and testing cases of the proposed predictive model is 3.59% and 4.71%, which has 4.2% and 3.1% improvement compared to conventional ANN model with a fixed structure. The proposed adaptive predictive model can be applied in building energy management system to accurately predict day-ahead building cooling demand using the latest forecast weather profile.