Multi-Energy Coupling Load Forecasting in Integrated Energy System with Improved Variational Mode Decomposition-Temporal Convolutional Network-Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Model

Accurate load forecasting is crucial to the stable operation of integrated energy systems (IES), which plays a significant role in advancing sustainable development. Addressing the challenge of insufficient prediction accuracy caused by the inherent uncertainty and volatility of load data, this study proposes a multi-energy load forecasting method for IES using an improved VMD-TCN-BiLSTM model. The proposed model consists of optimizing the Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) parameters through a mathematical model based on minimizing the average permutation entropy (PE). Moreover, load sequences are decomposed into different Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) using VMD, with the optimal number of models determined by the average PE to reduce the non-stationarity of the original sequences. Considering the coupling relationship among electrical, thermal, and cooling loads, the input features of the forecasting model are constructed by combining the IMF set of multi-energy loads with meteorological data and related load information. As a result, a hybrid neural network structure, integrating a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) with a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network for load prediction is developed. The Sand Cat Swarm Optimization (SCSO) algorithm is employed to obtain the optimal hyper-parameters of the TCN-BiLSTM model. A case analysis is performed using the Arizona State University Tempe campus dataset. The findings demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform six other existing models in terms of Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and Coefficient of Determination (R2), verifying its effectiveness and superiority in load forecasting.