Improving the Efficiency of Multistep Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting via R-CNN with ML-LSTM

Multistep power consumption forecasting is smart grid electricity management’s most decisive problem. Moreover, it is vital to develop operational strategies for electricity management systems in smart cities for commercial and residential users. However, an efficient electricity load forecasting model is required for accurate electric power management in an intelligent grid, leading to customer financial benefits. In this article, we develop an innovative framework for short-term electricity load forecasting, which includes two significant phases: data cleaning and a Residual Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) with multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (ML-LSTM) architecture. Data preprocessing strategies are applied in the first phase over raw data. A deep R-CNN architecture is developed in the second phase to extract essential features from the refined electricity consumption data. The output of R-CNN layers is fed into the ML-LSTM network to learn the sequence information, and finally, fully connected layers are used for the forecasting. The proposed model is evaluated over residential IHEPC and commercial PJM datasets and extensively decreases the error rates compared to baseline models.