Short-Term Electricity Load Forecast Using Hybrid Model Based on Neural Network and Evolutionary Algorithm

Abstract

Electricity load forecast needs to ensure minimum load wastage and requires intelligent decision-making systems to accurately predict future load demand. Learning capability, robustness and ability to solve nonlinear problems make ANN widely acceptable. For accurate short-term load forecast (STLF), an ensemble soft computing approach, namely ANN-PSOHm, composed of an artificial neural network (ANN) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) with homeostasis based mutation is presented in this article. To enhance the learning strength of ANN, PSO undergoes homeostasis mutation to bring greater diversity among solutions by exploring in wider search space. To demonstrate the effectiveness of ANN, three case studies on load data of NEPOOL region (courtesy ISO New England) are performed. The experimental results show that ANN-PSOHm improves accuracy by 11.57% MAPE over ANN-PSO.