Long-term load forecasting via a hierarchical neural model with time integrators

A novel hierarchical hybrid neural model to the problem of long-term load forecasting is proposed in this paper. The neural model is made up of two self-organizing map nets – one on top of the other –, and a single-layer perceptron. It has application into domains which require time series analysis. The model is compared to a multilayer perceptron. Both the hierarchical and the multilayer perceptron models are trained and assessed on load data extracted from a North-American electric utility. They are required to predict either once every week or once every month the electric peak-load and mean-load during the next two years. The results are presented and evaluated in the paper.