Bottom-Up Load Forecasting With Markov-Based Error Reduction Method for Aggregated Domestic Electric Water Heaters

Domestic electric water heaters (DEWHs) can provide operational flexibility for load control due to their energy storage capacity. Load forecasting for aggregated DEWHs is important for providing information of baseline load and controlling electricity demand profile without negative impact to the normal end use. Advanced metering infrastructures nowadays provide more possibilities to further enhance forecasting with bottom-up method. This article proposes a bottom-up forecasting with Markov-based error reduction method to predict power consumption of aggregated DEWHs for multiple forecast horizons. DEWHs are randomly divided into small aggregations, whose power consumption is forecasted by independent forecast engines. In this paper, the engines are K-means and wavelet decomposition-based neural networks. After summing all forecasting of small aggregations up, a new Markov-based error reduction method is proposed to extract features in residuals and mitigate forecasting error accumulation introduced by the summation, providing opportunities to further improve forecasting accuracy for the total DEWH load. Differing from traditional Markov-based error reduction, two new compensation parameters (compensation coefficient, and compensation threshold) are proposed. They are determined by using particle swarm optimization algorithm. Experiments on real and simulated DEWH loads verified the effectiveness of the proposed forecasting method. The proposed method improved the forecast accuracy over selected benchmark algorithms by about 20% to 80%, according to four performance metrics: mean absolute error, mean absolute percentage error, root-mean-square error, normalized form RMSE. The aggregation effects on performance were also analyzed in theory and tested with simulated DEWHs, providing a good indication of the forecast dependence on the aggregation size.