An artificial neural network based short term load forecasting with special tuning for weekends and seasonal changes

The artificial neural network (ANN) technique is utilized for power electric load forecasting using the backpropagation algorithm developed by the authors. The major contribution of this work is the ability to forecast the power electric load for weekends and holidays as well as weekdays with a relatively small training set. In addition the effect of seasonal change in load pattern can be tracked down. Their approach is to introduce three different sets of inputs to the ANN in order to follow the load pattern, weather pattern, seasonal factors and to consider special events like weekends and holidays.