A real-time short-term load forecasting system using functional link network

This paper presents a new functional-link network based short-term electric load forecasting system for realtime implementation. The load and weather parameters are modelled as a nonlinear ARMA process and parameters of this model are obtained using the functional approximation capabilities of an auto-enhanced Functional Link net. The adaptive mechanism with a nonlinear learning rule is used to train the link network on-line. The results indicate that the functional link net based load forecasting system produces robust and more accurate load forecasts in comparison to simple adaptive neural network or statistical based approaches. Testing the algorithm with load and weather data for a period of two years reveals satisfactory performance with mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) mostly less than 2% for a 24-hour ahead forecast and less than 2.5% for a 168-hour ahead forecast.