Day-Ahead Prediction of Microgrid Electricity Demand Using a Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Model

Improved-performance day-ahead electricity demand forecast is important to deliver necessary information for right decision of energy management of microgrids. It supports microgrid operators and stakeholders to have better decisions on microgrid flexibility, stability and control. The available conventional forecasting methods for electricity demand at national or regional level are not effective for electricity demand forecasting in microgrids. This is due to the fact that the electricity consumption in microgrids is many times less than the regional or national demands and it is highly volatile. In this paper, an integrated Artificial Intelligence (AI) based approach consisting of Wavelet Transform (WT), Simulated Annealing (SA) and Feedforward Artificial Neural Network (FFANN) is devised for day-ahead prediction of electric power consumption in microgrids. The FFANN is the basic forecasting engine of the proposed model. The WT is utilized to extract relevant features of the target variable (electric load data series) to obtain a cluster of enhanced-feature subseries. The extracted subseries of the past values of the electric load demand data are employed as the target variables to model the FFANN. The SA optimization technique is employed to obtain the optimal values of the FFANN weight parameters during the training process. Historical information of actual electricity consumption, meteorological variables, daily variations, weekly variations, and working/non-working day indicators have been employed to develop the forecasting tool of the devised integrated AI based approach. The approach is validated using electricity demand data of an operational microgrid in Beijing, China. The prediction results are presented for future testing days with one-hour time interval. The validation results demonstrated that the devised approach is capable to forecast the microgrid electricity demand with acceptably small error and reasonably short computation time. Moreover, the prediction performance of the devised approach has been evaluated relative to other four approaches and resulted in better prediction accuracy.