Use of ANNs for short-term load forecasting

The application of artificial neural networks (ANNs) to short term load forecasting has gained a lot of attention. The availability of historical load data on the utility databases makes this area highly suitable for ANN implementation, ANNs are able to learn the relationship among past, current, and future weather variables and loads combining both time series and regressional approaches. A wide variety of different types of ANNs have been used for load forecasting in the last few years resulting in a noticeable number of publications on the subject. In this paper, a MLP type of artificial neural network is used for short-term load forecasting using real load and weather data from the Hydro-Quebec databases.