A Hybrid Short-Term Load Forecasting Approach for Individual Residential Customer

This article proposes a hybrid method (HM) to improve the accuracy of short-term individual residential load forecasting. The HM includes an ensemble model (EM), deep ensemble model (DEM), and thermal dynamic model expressed by resistance-capacitance (RC). The EM consists of three predictors of support vector machine (SVM), back propagation neural network (BPNN), and generalized regression neural network (GRNN). The genetic algorithm (GA) is used to optimize SVM and BPNN to enhance their performance. The DEM includes multiple bi-directional long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM) networks. The Bayesian algorithm (BA) is used to optimize the hyperparameters of the Bi-LSTM. The outputs of individual predictors are aggregated using an optimal trimmed algorithm. At first, the total load is separated into the heater and air conditioning (HAC), and non-HAC loads. Then, the RC model is presented to predict the indoor temperature, which integrates outdoor weather and less HAC historical data as the input of the EM to forecast the HAC load. After that, non-HAC loads are further divided into electric lighting and other loads. A daylight equation is used to calculate the illuminance, which is combined with less lighting historical data as the input of DEM to predict electric lights usage. Then, other loads are captured by DEM through less historical data. Finally, the total load is obtained by combining the predicted HAC and non-HAC loads. The datasets from the UMass Smart Microgrid and Flexhouse projects are used to test the proposed method. The comparison with existing models proves that the presented model can provide accurate short-term individual load forecasting.