Short-term load forecasting of regional integrated energy system based on spatio-temporal convolutional graph neural network

Accurate short-term load forecasting has significant reference value for the preliminary planning and subsequent coordinated control of regional integrated energy systems. However, main limitations are: (1) Insufficient exploration of the complex correlations among diverse loads and between loads and meteorological factors; and (2) Feature information extraction only from the time dimension, neglecting the spatial dimension, resulting in incomplete feature information extraction. This paper proposes a new method for short-term load forecasting, namely the Attention Spatial–temporal Graph Convolutional Network (ATSTGCN) method. Firstly, the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) method is used to analyze the correlation between diverse loads, meteorological features, and load features, constructing the input data for the graph neural network. Then, synchronous graph convolution is introduced to extract information between features. Next, the spatio-temporal attention mechanism is incorporated into the synchronous graph convolution to capture spatio-temporal features and reduce information loss using a spatio-temporal window. Finally, a short-term load forecasting method based on ATSTGCN for regional integrated energy systems is constructed. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted on the publicly available dataset from Arizona State University's online system. The experimental results show that compared to other methods, the proposed method improves MAPE, MAE, and RMSE by 5.6%, 11.7%, and 11.6%.