An ultra-short-term forecasting method for multivariate loads of user-level integrated energy systems in a microscopic perspective: based on multi-energy spatio-temporal coupling and dual-attention mechanism

An ultra-short-term multivariate load forecasting method under a microscopic perspective is proposed to address the characteristics of user-level integrated energy systems (UIES), which are small in scale and have large load fluctuations. Firstly, the spatio-temporal correlation of users' energy use behavior within the UIES is analyzed, and a multivariate load input feature set in the form of a class image is constructed based on the various types of load units. Secondly, in order to maintain the feature independence and temporal integrity of each load during the feature extraction process, a deep neural network architecture with spatio-temporal coupling characteristics is designed. Among them, the multi-channel parallel convolutional neural network (MCNN) performs independent spatial feature extraction of the 2D load component pixel images at each moment in time, and feature fusion of various types of load features in high dimensional space. A bidirectional long short-term memory network (BiLSTM) is used as a feature sharing layer to perform temporal feature extraction on the fused load sequences. In addition, a spatial attention layer and a temporal attention layer are designed in this paper for the original input load pixel images and the fused load sequences, respectively, so that the model can better capture the important information. Finally, a multi-task learning approach based on the hard sharing mechanism achieves joint prediction of each load. The measured load data of a UIES is analyzed as an example to verify the superiority of the method proposed in this paper.