A Hybrid GRU-MHSAM-ResNet Model for Short-Term Power Load Forecasting

Reliable load forecasting is crucial for ensuring optimal dispatch, grid security, and cost efficiency. To address limitations in prediction accuracy and generalization, this paper proposes a hybrid model, GRU-MHSAM-ResNet, which integrates a gated recurrent unit (GRU), multi-head self-attention (MHSAM), and a residual network (ResNet)block. Firstly, GRU is employed as a deep temporal encoder to extract features from historical load data, offering a simpler structure than long short-term memory (LSTM). Then, the MHSAM is used to generate adaptive representations by weighting input features, thereby strengthening the key features. Finally, the features are processed by fully connected layers, while a ResNet block is added to mitigate gradient vanishing and explosion, thus improving prediction accuracy. The experimental results on actual load datasets from systems in China, Australia, and Malaysia demonstrate that the proposed GRU-MHSAM-ResNet model exhibits superior predictive accuracy to compared models, including the CBR model and the LSTM-ResNet model. On the three datasets, the proposed model achieved a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 1.65% (China), 5.52% (Australia), and 1.57% (Malaysia), representing a significant improvement over the other models. Furthermore, in five repeated experiments on the Malaysian dataset, it exhibited lower error fluctuation and greater result stability compared to the benchmark LSTM-ResNet model. Therefore, the proposed model provides a new forecasting method for power system dispatch, exhibiting high accuracy and generalization ability.