Short-Term Multi-Energy Load Forecasting Method Based on Transformer Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network

To tackle the limitations in simultaneously modeling long-term dependencies in the time dimension and nonlinear interactions in the feature dimension, as well as their inability to fully reflect the impact of real-time load changes on spatial dependencies, a short-term multi-energy load forecasting method based on Transformer Spatio-Temporal Graph neural network (TSTG) is proposed. This method employs a multi-head spatio-temporal attention module to model long-term dependencies in the time dimension and nonlinear interactions in the feature dimension in parallel across multiple subspaces. Additionally, a dynamic adaptive graph convolution module is designed to construct adaptive adjacency matrices by combining physical topology and feature similarity, dynamically adjusting node connection weights based on real-time load characteristics to more accurately characterize the spatial dynamics of multi-energy interactions. Furthermore, TSTG adopts an end-to-end spatio-temporal joint optimization framework, achieving synchronous extraction and fusion of spatio-temporal features through an encoder–decoder architecture. Experimental results show that TSTG significantly outperforms existing methods in short-term load forecasting tasks, providing an effective solution for refined forecasting in integrated energy systems.