Short-Term Load Forecasting Based on VMD and Deep TCN-Based Hybrid Model with Self-Attention Mechanism

Due to difficulties with electric energy storage, balancing the supply and demand of the power grid is crucial for the stable operation of power systems. Short-term load forecasting can provide an early warning of excessive power consumption for utilities by formulating the generation, transmission and distribution of electric energy in advance. However, the nonlinear patterns and dynamics of load data still make accurate load forecasting a challenging task. To address this issue, a deep temporal convolutional network (TCN)-based hybrid model combined with variational mode decomposition (VMD) and self-attention mechanism (SAM) is proposed in this study. Firstly, VMD is used to decompose the original load data into a series of intrinsic mode components that are used to reconstruct a feature matrix combined with other external factors. Secondly, a three-layer convolutional neural network is used as a deep network to extract in-depth features between adjacent time points from the feature matrix, and then the output matrix captures the long-term temporal dependencies using the TCN. Thirdly, long short-term memory (LSTM) is utilized to enhance the extraction of temporal features, and the correlation weights of spatiotemporal features are future-adjusted dynamically using SAM to retain important features during the model training. Finally, the load forecasting results can be obtained from the fully connected layer. The effectiveness and generalization of the proposed model were validated on two real-world public datasets, ISO-NE and GEFCom2012. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model significantly improves the prediction accuracy in terms of evaluation metrics, compared with other contrast models.