Wang and Mendel's fuzzy rule learning method for energy consumption forecasting considering the influence of environmental temperature

摘要

Reliable consumption forecasts are crucial in several aspects of power and energy systems, e.g. to take advantage of the full potential of flexibility from consumers and to support the management from operators. With this need, several methodologies for electricity forecasting have emerged. However, the study of correlated external variables, such as temperature or luminosity, is still far from adequate. This paper presents the application of the Wang and Mendel's Fuzzy Rule Learning Method (WM) to forecast electricity consumption. The proposed approach includes two distinct strategies, the first one uses only the electricity consumption as the input of the method, and the second strategy considers a combination of the electricity consumption and the environmental temperature as the input, in order to extract value from the correlation between the two variables. A case study that considers the forecast of the energy consumption of a real office building is also presented. Results show that the WM method using the combination of energy consumption data and environmental temperature is able to provide more reliable forecasts for the energy consumption than several other methods experimented before, namely based on artificial neural networks and support vector machines. Additionally, the WM approach that considers the combination of input values achieves better results than the strategy that considers only the consumption history, hence concluding that WM is appropriate to incorporate different information sources.