Neural networks for short-term load forecasting: A review and evaluation

Load forecasting has become in recent years one of the major areas of research in electrical engineering, and most traditional forecasting models and artificial intelligence techniques have been tried out in this task. Artificial neural networks (NNs) have lately received much attention, and a great number of papers have reported successful experiments and practical tests with them. Nevertheless, some authors remain skeptical, and believe that the advantages of using NNs in forecasting have not been systematically proved yet. In order to investigate the reasons for such skepticism, this review examines a collection of papers (published between 1991 and 1999) that report the application of NNs to short-term load forecasting. Our aim is to help to clarify the issue, by critically evaluating the ways in which the NNs proposed in these papers were designed and tested.