Previsão de cargas elétricas a curto prazo por combinação de previsões via regressão simbólica

Abstract

Decision-making in energy companies relies heavily on the availability of accurate load forecasts. Because storing electricity on a large scale is not viable, the cost of short-term energy purchasing is high, and there are government fines and sanctions for failing to supply energy on demand, short-term load forecasts are important for the optimization of resource allocation and energy production. In this work we used nine univariate time series methods for short-term load forecasts, with forecast horizons ranging from 1 to 24 hours ahead. In order to improve the accuracy of forecasts, we propose a method of combining forecasts through Symbolic Regression, which combines in a non-linear way the forecasts obtained by the nine methods of the time series used. Unlike other non-linear regression methods, Symbolic Regression does not need a previous specification of the function structure. We applied the proposed method to a real time series of the city of Rio de Janeiro (RJ), which contains data on hourly loads of 104 weeks in the years 1996 and 1997. We compare, through the criteria indicated in the literature, the results obtained by the proposed method with the results obtained by traditional methods of forecasts combination and the result obtained by artificial neural networks applied to the same dataset. The method has yielded better results, indicating that non-linearity may be important in combining predictions in short term load forecasts.