Previsão do consumo de energia elétrica a curto prazo, usando combinações de métodos univariados

Abstract

Forecasting the demand for electric power is crucial for the production planning in energy utilities. The focus of this study are the short-term forecasts. We apply univariate time series methods to the forecasting of a series containing observations of the energy consumption of 104 weeks in Rio de Janeiro, in 1996 and 1997, and experiment with several combinations of the methods which have the best performance. These combinations are done by the outperformance method, a simple linear combination with fixed weights. The results were compared to those obtained by neural networks on the same problem, and with the results of a exponential smoothing method for dual additive seasonality. Overall, the exponential smoothing method achieved the best results, and was shown to be perhaps the most reliable and suitable for practical applications, even though it needs improvements to ensure complete extraction of the information contained in the data.