LAUSR

Load forecasting is a procedure of fundamental importance in power systems operation and planning. Many entities can benefit from accurate load forecasting such as generation companies, systems operators, retailers, prosumers, and others. A variety of models have been proposed so far in the literature. Among them, artificial neural networks are a favorable approach mainly due to their potential for capturing the relationship between load and other parameters. The forecasting performance highly depends on the number and types of inputs. The present paper presents a particle swarm optimization (PSO) two-step method for increasing the performance of short-term load forecasting (STLF). During the first step, PSO is applied to derive the optimal types of inputs for a neural network. Next, PSO is applied again so that the available training data is split into homogeneous clusters. For each cluster, a different neural network is utilized. Experimental results verify the robustness of the proposed approach in a bus load forecasting problem. Also, the proposed algorithm is checked on a load profiling problem where it outperforms the most common algorithms of the load profiling-related literature. During input selection, the weights update is held in asymmetrical duration. The weights of the training phase require more time compared with the test phase.