Probabilistic Forecasting of Cogenerated District Heating in Finland Under Structural Fleet Transition: A Temporal Fusion Transformer Approach

District heating systems in Finland are undergoing structural transition as combined heat and power (CHP) plants are decommissioned, creating non-stationary forecasting conditions that challenge conventional models. This paper presents a probabilistic forecasting pipeline for national Finnish CHP-based district heating using a Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) trained on nine years of hourly Fingrid open data. A residual-from-persistence target reformulation is introduced to handle non-stationarity under structural regime shift, significantly improving forecast accuracy. The proposed TFT-resid model achieves a mean absolute error of 87.4 MWh/h and a sMAPE of 21.2%, outperforming XGBoost baselines and naive persistence benchmarks. This work forms the research foundation of the ET-Design Lab (Aurinkolab Community), where the forecasting methodology is applied in the construction of an AI-driven Uusimaa Heating Digital Twin — a real student-built tool at the intersection of cutting-edge energy research and hands-on engineering education for teenagers.

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-05-11
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20118487
Primary Topic
Integrated Energy Systems Optimization
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Probabilistic Forecasting of Cogenerated District Heating in Finland Under Structural Fleet Transition: A Temporal Fusion Transformer Approach

Maria Rohnonen
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Integrated Energy Systems Optimization
article

Probabilistic Forecasting of Cogenerated District Heating in Finland Under Structural Fleet Transition: A Temporal Fusion Transformer Approach

Maria Rohnonen
article en

Abstract

District heating systems in Finland are undergoing structural transition as combined heat and power (CHP) plants are decommissioned, creating non-stationary forecasting conditions that challenge conventional models. This paper presents a probabilistic forecasting pipeline for national Finnish CHP-based district heating using a Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) trained on nine years of hourly Fingrid open data. A residual-from-persistence target reformulation is introduced to handle non-stationarity under structural regime shift, significantly improving forecast accuracy. The proposed TFT-resid model achieves a mean absolute error of 87.4 MWh/h and a sMAPE of 21.2%, outperforming XGBoost baselines and naive persistence benchmarks. This work forms the research foundation of the ET-Design Lab (Aurinkolab Community), where the forecasting methodology is applied in the construction of an AI-driven Uusimaa Heating Digital Twin — a real student-built tool at the intersection of cutting-edge energy research and hands-on engineering education for teenagers.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Arcada University of Applied Sciences (FI)
Affordable and clean energy
Openalex Percentile: Top 9%
Integrated Energy Systems Optimization
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