Explainable AI and optimized solar power generation forecasting model based on environmental conditions

This paper proposes a model called X-LSTM-EO, which integrates explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), long short-term memory (LSTM), and equilibrium optimizer (EO) to reliably forecast solar power generation. The LSTM component forecasts power generation rates based on environmental conditions, while the EO component optimizes the LSTM model’s hyper-parameters through training. The XAI-based Local Interpretable and Model-independent Explanation (LIME) is adapted to identify the critical factors that influence the accuracy of the power generation forecasts model in smart solar systems. The effectiveness of the proposed X-LSTM-EO model is evaluated through the use of five metrics; R-squared (R2), root mean square error (RMSE), coefficient of variation (COV), mean absolute error (MAE), and efficiency coefficient (EC). The proposed model gains values 0.99, 0.46, 0.35, 0.229, and 0.95, for R2, RMSE, COV, MAE, and EC respectively. The results of this paper improve the performance of the original model’s conventional LSTM, where the improvement rate is; 148%, 21%, 27%, 20%, 134% for R2, RMSE, COV, MAE, and EC respectively. The performance of LSTM is compared with other machine learning algorithm such as Decision tree (DT), Linear regression (LR) and Gradient Boosting. It was shown that the LSTM model worked better than DT and LR when the results were compared. Additionally, the PSO optimizer was employed instead of the EO optimizer to validate the outcomes, which further demonstrated the efficacy of the EO optimizer. The experimental results and simulations demonstrate that the proposed model can accurately estimate PV power generation in response to abrupt changes in power generation patterns. Moreover, the proposed model might assist in optimizing the operations of photovoltaic power units. The proposed model is implemented utilizing TensorFlow and Keras within the Google Collab environment.