Title: Heat load prediction in district heating and cooling systems through recurrent neural networks

Authors: Masatoshi Sakawa; Takeshi Matsui

Addresses: Department of System Cybernetics, Graduate School of Engineering, Higashi-Hiroshima, 739-8527, Japan ' Department of System Cybernetics, Graduate School of Engineering, Higashi-Hiroshima, 739-8527, Japan

Abstract: Heat load is the amount of cold water, hot water and steam used for air conditioning in a district heating and cooling system. Heat load prediction in district heating and cooling (DHC) systems is one of the key technologies for economical and safe operations of DHC systems. The heat load prediction method through a simplified robust filter and a three-layered neural network has been used in an actual DHC plant on a trial basis. Unfortunately, however, there exists a drawback that its prediction becomes less accurate in periods when the heat load is non-stationary. In this paper, for adapting the dynamical variation of heat load together with a new kind of input data in consideration of the characteristics of heat load data, a novel prediction method through a recurrent neural network is presented. Several numerical experiments with actual heat load data demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.

Keywords: district heating and cooling systems; heat load prediction; recurrent neural networks; RNNs; data characteristics; air conditioning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2015.069623

International Journal of Operational Research, 2015 Vol.23 No.3, pp.284 - 300

Received: 11 Mar 2013
Accepted: 05 Aug 2013

Published online: 29 May 2015 *

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