Local weather prediction system for a heating plant using cognitive approaches

•A structure of a weather prediction system is proposed.•Realized measuring points for data collection and transfer of weather variables.•Designed and tested prediction model based on chained neural networks.•Realized means for data modification based on fuzzy logic.•A prediction system is implemented in a heating plant.

Present-day requirements emphasize the need of saving energy. It relates mainly to industrial companies, where the minimization of energy consumption is one of their most important tasks they face. In our paper, we deal with the design of the so-called weather prediction system (WPS) for the needs of a heating plant. The primary task of such a WPS is timely predicting expected heat consumption to prepare the technology characterized by long delays in advance. Heat prediction depends primarily on weather so the crucial part of WPS is the weather, especially temperature, prediction. However, a prediction system needs a variety of further data, too. Therefore, WPS must be regarded as a complex system, including data collection, its processing, own prediction and eventual decision support. This paper gives the overview about existing data processing systems and prediction methods and then it describes a concrete design of a WPS with distributed data measuring points (stations), which are processed using a structure of neural networks based on multilayer perceptrons (MLP) with a combination of fuzzy logic. Based on real experiments we show that also such simple means as MLPs are able to solve complex problems. The paper contains a basic methodology for designing similar WPS, too.

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