Short-term load forecasting in air-conditioned non-residential Buildings

Short-term load forecasting (STLF) has become an essential tool in the electricity sector. It has been classically object of vast research since energy load prediction is known to be non-linear. In a previous work, we focused on non-residential building STLF, an special case of STLF where weather has negligible influence on the load. Now we tackle more modern buildings in which the temperature does alter its energy consumption. This is, we address here fully-HVAC (Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning) ones. Still, in this problem domain, the forecasting method selected must be simple, without tedious trial-and-error configuring or parametrising procedures, work with scarce (or any) training data and be able to predict an evolving demand curve. Following our preceding research, we have avoided the inherent non-linearity by using the work day schedule as day-type classifier. We have evaluated the most popular STLF systems in the literature, namely ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) time series and Neural networks (NN), together with an Autoregressive Model (AR) time series and a Bayesian network (BN), concluding that the autoregressive time series outperforms its counterparts and suffices to fulfil the addressed requirements, even in a 6 day-ahead horizon.