Energy demand forecasting in Iranian metal industry using linear and nonlinear models based on evolutionary algorithms

Developing energy-forecasting models is known as one of the most important steps in long-term planning. In order to achieve sustainable energy supply toward economic development and social welfare, it is required to apply precise forecasting model. Applying artificial intelligent models for estimation complex economic and social functions is growing up considerably in many researches recently. In this paper, energy consumption in industrial sector as one of the critical sectors in the consumption of energy has been investigated. Two linear and three nonlinear functions have been used in order to forecast and analyze energy in the Iranian metal industry, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are applied to attain parameters of the models. The Real-Coded Genetic Algorithm (RCGA) has been developed based on real numbers, which is introduced as a new approach in the field of energy forecasting. In the proposed model, electricity consumption has been considered as a function of different variables such as electricity tariff, manufacturing value added, prevailing fuel prices, the number of employees, the investment in equipment and consumption in the previous years. Mean Square Error (MSE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) and Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) are the four functions which have been used as the fitness function in the evolutionary algorithms. The results show that the logarithmic nonlinear model using PSO algorithm with 1.91 error percentage has the best answer. Furthermore, the prediction of electricity consumption in industrial sector of Turkey and also Turkish industrial sector is reinvestigated, the results indicate significant improvement.

► Investigating different fitness functions for evolutionary algorithms in energy forecasting.
► Energy forecasting of Iranian metal industry by value added, energy prices, investment and employees.
► Using real-coded instead of binary-coded genetic algorithm decreases energy forecasting error.