Building cooling load forecasting of IES considering spatiotemporal coupling based on hybrid deep learning model

• Published in: Applied energy 2023-11, Vol.349, p.121547, Article 121547
• Main Authors: Yu, Min, Niu, Dongxiao, Zhao, Jinqiu, Li, Mingyu, Sun, Lijie, Yu, Xiaoyu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cooling load forecasting; Gate temporal convolutional layer; Spatio-temporal coupling; Temporal trend-aware graph attention network
• ISSN: 0306-2619
• DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2023.121547

Accurate short-term forecasting of building cooling load (CLF) in an integrated energy system (IES) is essential for effective building energy management. However, the existing CLF models for IES often treat each building as an independent entity and neglect the spatiotemporal correlation among buildings. To address this research gap and achieve accurate CLF, this paper proposes a new hybrid deep learning model that considers spatiotemporal coupling. First, the coupled spatial–temporal features among different buildings were analyzed, and the meteorological factors were screened based on the Spearman's rank order correlation coefficient (SROCC). Second, synchrosqueezing wavelet denoising (SWT) was adopted to denoise the historical cooling load (CL) data, remove high-frequency noise, and improve data quality. Third, the TTGAT-GTC model was constructed for the CLF of an IES. A temporal trend-aware graph attention network (TTGAT) captured the spatial correlation of CL between buildings. A gated temporal convolution layer (GTC) was constructed to extract the trend in the dynamic temporal variation in historical load. Residual and skip connections were applied to avoid gradient disappearance and increase the computational efficiency of the model. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed SWT-TTGAT-GTC model, this paper compared the proposed model with four benchmark models using MAPE, RMSE, MAE, and R2. The experimental results showed that the performance of the proposed CL forecasting model is superior and that the proposed model appropriately introduces the spatio-temporal coupling information between buildings. •The spatiotemporal information between related buildings is appropriately considered in CL.•TTGAT captures the spatial correlation of cooling load between buildings.•GTC extracts the trend in dynamic temporal variation between buildings.•Residual and skip connections are used to avoid gradient disappearance.