Short-Term Smart Grid Load Forecasting Based on CNN-BiLSTM with Attention Mechanism

The existing power load data exhibits complex multidimensionality, while existing techniques often focus on learning and forecasting from single load data. To fully exploit the complex multidimensionality of the existing power load data and enhance the accuracy of short-term load forecasting, a smart grid short-term load forecasting model based on attention mechanism and CNN-BiLSTM is proposed. Firstly, the one-dimensional convolutional network (1D-CNN) slides along the temporal dimension to extract multidimensional features such as temperature and humidity from the raw power load data. Secondly, the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network (BiLSTM) captures both historical and future information of the data through gate mechanisms and the bidirectional network structure. Lastly, the attention mechanism allocates weights to focus on important parts of the load sequence data, enhancing the model’s ability to identify key information and further improving the accuracy of short-term power load forecasting. The method is experimented on a real-world multivariate load dataset and compared with existing learning methods. The proposed model achieved lower RMSE in 24-hour load forecasting compared to CNN-LSTM, CNN-BiLSTM, LSTM-Attention, BiLSTM-Attention and CNN-LSTM-Attention models by 13.2%, 10.6%, 6.7%, 5.7% and 5.9% respectively.