ANN-Based Day-Ahead Short Term Load Forecasting

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Load forecasting (LF) is of great significance for effective operation, utilization, safety and reliability of the modern electric power systems. Load forecasting can be categorized into very short term, short-term, medium-term, and long-term forecasts, depending on which time scale is concerned. The short term load forecasting (STLF) plays an increasingly important role in achieving a more efficient, reliable and safe power system. Its outputs are the indispensable inputs of generating scheduling, power system security assessment and power dispatch. In the era of smart grid (SG), STLF is the basic building block to imply Demand Side Management (DSM) in areas such as automatic generation control, load estimation, energy purchasing, and contract evaluation, etc. The accuracy of STLF is of essential importance for both economic and reliability. In the last few decades, various methods have been devised and applied to perform STLF. Due to its superior capability of handling the nonlinearity, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based techniques are gaining more popularity in a variety of applications. The objective of this study is to review, categorize, evaluate, and analyze the principle, application, and performance of STLF techniques. It builds up several feed forward Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) models with different configurations, and studies the mechanism of ANN for effective STLF. With 12 years of hourly load and meteorological data sets of a section of the City of Toronto, the configurations are built up with different hidden layers, activating function, training algorithms and both un-normalized and normalized data to predict the day ahead STLF with satisfactory result achieved.