Forecasting heat load for smart district heating systems: A machine learning approach

The rapid increase in energy demand requires effective measures to plan and optimize resources for efficient energy production within a smart grid environment. This paper presents a data driven approach to forecasting heat load for multi-family apartment buildings in a District Heating System (DHS). The forecasting model is built using six and eleven weeks of data from five building substations. The external factors and internal factors influencing the heat load in substations are parameters used as our model´s input. Short-term forecast models are generated using four supervised Machine Learning (ML) techniques: Support Vector Regression (SVR), Regression Tree, Feed Forwards Neural Network (FFNN) and Multiple Linear Regression (MLR). Performance comparison among these ML methods was carried out. The effects of combining the internal and external factors influencing heat load at substations was studied. The models are evaluated with varying horizon up to 24-hours ahead. The results show that SVR has the best accuracy of 5.6% MAPE for the best-case scenario.