Towards Developing a Decision Support System for Electricity Load Forecast

Short-term load forecasting (STLF) is an essential procedure for effective and efficient realtime operations planning and control of generation within a power system. It provides the basis for unit-commitment and power system planning procedures, maintenance schedul‐ ing, system security assessment, and trading schedules. It establishes the generation, capaci‐ ty, and spinning reserve schedules which are posted to the market. Without optimal load forecasts, additional expenses due to uneconomic dispatch, over/under purchasing, and reli‐ ability uncertainty can cost a utility millions of dollars [1].