Building Cooling Load Forecasting Based on Support Vector Machines with Simulated Annealing

Accurate forecasting of building cooling load has been one of the most important issues in the electricity industry. Recently, along with energy-saving optimal control, accurate forecast of electricity load has received increasing attention. Because of the general nonlinear mapping capabilities of forecasting, artificial neural networks have played a crucial role in forecasting electricity load. Support vector machines (SVMs) have been successfully employed to solve nonlinear regression and time series problems. In order to improve time efficiency of prediction, a new hourly cooling load prediction model and method based on Support Vector Machine in this paper. Moreover, simulated annealing (SA) algorithms were employed to choose the parameters of a SVM model. Subsequently, examples of cooling load data from Guangzhou were used to illustrate the proposed SVM-SA model. A comparison of the performance between SVM optimized by Particle Swarm Optimization (SVM-PSO) and SVM-SA is carried out. Experiments results demonstrate that SVM-SA can achieve better accuracy and generalization than the SVM-PSO. Consequently, the SVM-SA model provides a promising alternative for forecasting building load.