Edge-Based Short-Term Energy Demand Prediction

The electrical grid is gradually transitioning towards being an interconnected area of the smart grid, where embedded devices operate in an autonomous manner without any human intervention. An important element for this transition is the energy demand prediction, since the needs for energy have substantially increased due to the introduction of new and heavy consumption sources, such as electric vehicles. Accurate energy demand prediction, especially for short-term durations (i.e., minutes to hours), allows grid operators to produce the substantial amount needed to satisfy the demand–response equilibrium and avoid peak electricity load conditions that may also lead to blackouts in densely populated areas. However, to achieve such an accuracy level, machine learning (ML) models require extensive training with historical measurements, which is usually resource intensive (e.g., in memory and processing power). Hence, deriving accurate predictions for short-term energy demands is challenging due to the absence of external factors such as environmental data from different regions and seasons and categorical values such as bank/bridging holidays in the ML model. Additionally, existing work focuses on ML model execution on Cloud platforms, which usually does not satisfy the real-time requirements of grid operators for short-term energy demand predictions. To address these challenges, this article presents a new method that considers environmental factors and categorical values to build an energy profile for each consumer in a multi-access edge computing (MEC) framework. The method is also based on the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) ML model, which allows it to learn the temporal dependencies of the gathered historical measurements and predict energy demands with satisfying accuracy. The method is applied to a home energy management system testbed containing photovoltaic systems, smart meters, sensors and actuators for detecting environmental factors (i.e., temperature, humidity and radiation) as well as energy storage systems as an additional energy supply source. The MEC framework is deployed in data concentrator devices where the TFT ML model is executed with low resource requirements, ensuring additional security as the data do not leave the location where they are produced.