An artificial neural network optimized by grey wolf optimizer for prediction of hourly wind speed in Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

• The hourly wind speed prediction is an important problem. • A feed-forward (FF) multi-layer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural network (ANN) is used for prediction. • The FF MLP ANN is optimized by 9 state-of-art metaheuristic algorithms. • In the experiments, 38 years of hourly wind data belonging to 5 cities were used. • Grey Wolf Optimizer produced best results in terms of mean square error (MSE). The growing population has tremendously increased the daily energy demand all around the world. India is the second-most crowded nation in the world with approximately 1.4 billion people. New and renewable energy is on the agenda of India and in 2021 India possesses the fourth-largest installed capacity of wind power. Accurate prediction of wind speed is vital in wind farm design and operation. In this work, an hourly wind speed prediction with an artificial neural network optimized by a metaheuristics approach is conducted. A feed-forward (FF) multi-layer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural network (ANN) is used for the prediction of the hourly wind speed. In this study, 38 years of hourly wind data belonging to 5 cities (Ambur, Hosur, Kumbakonam, Nagapattinam, and Pudukottai) were used. These cities have different specific properties such as latitude, longitude, and altitude. The FF MLP ANN is optimized by 9 state-of-art metaheuristic algorithms. In this work, Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Biogeography Based Optimization (BBO), Evolutionary Strategy (ES), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Grey-Wolf-Optimizer (GWO), Population-Based Incremental Learning (PBIL), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Tree-Seed Algorithm (TSA) have been used to optimize the weights of the ANN. GWO outperforms other metaheuristic algorithms in the prediction of wind speed with a FF MLP ANN model, with a success percentage rate of approximately 3% to 10,000%.