A multi-information fusion model for short term load forecasting of an architectural complex considering spatio-temporal characteristics

Building load forecasting is critical for energy saving and carbon emission reduction, as building loads account for a rising percentage of energy consumption. Existing load forecasting methods only target a single building and do not consider the spatial characteristics of different building loads in an architectural complex, making it impossible to effectively forecast loads for all buildings in an architectural complex simultaneously. In this paper, considering the spatial correlation among building loads in an architectural complex, a novel short-term load forecasting method is proposed to improve the load forecasting accuracy for the architectural complex. First, Pearson correlation analysis is carried out to determine the key influencing factors of load, which are treated as multi-information. Then, to realize the load forecasting of all buildings in an architectural complex at the same time, a multi-information fusion model combined with a graph convolutional network and a long-short term memory network is proposed, and spatio-temporal attention modules are included to extract the dynamic spatio-temporal correlations of load. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated using actual load data from a public university in Beijing. When compared to other current methods, the experimental results show that the proposed model not only achieves the best results for architectural complex load forecasting (the largest MAPE is only 6.86%, the smallest R² and Accuracy reach 0.87 and 0.85, respectively), but also maintains forecasting stability to some extent over a longer forecast period. The proposed method is a meaningful step towards achieving fast and accurate architectural complex load forecasting.