Abstract
Short-term electricity load forecasting is critical and challenging for scheduling operations and production planning in modern power management systems due to stochastic characteristics of electricity load data. Current forecasting models mainly focus on adapting to various load data to improve the accuracy of the forecasting. However, these models ignore the noise and nonstationarity of the load data, resulting in forecasting uncertainty. To address this issue, a short-term load forecasting system is proposed by combining a modified information processing technique, an advanced meta-heuristics algorithm and deep neural networks. The information processing technique utilizes a sliding fuzzy granulation method to remove noise and obtain uncertainty information from load data. Deep neural networks can capture the nonlinear characteristics of load data to obtain forecasting performance gains due to the powerful mapping capability. A novel meta-heuristics algorithm is used to optimize the weighting coefficients to reduce the contingency and improve the stability of the forecasting. Both point forecasting and interval forecasting are utilized for comprehensive forecasting evaluation of future electricity load. Several experiments demonstrate the superiority, effectiveness and stability of the proposed system by comprehensively considering multiple evaluation metrics.