Electrical Load Forecasting in the Industrial Sector: A Literature Review of Machine Learning Models and Architectures for Grid Planning

Abstract

The energy transition, driven by the global shift toward renewable and electrification, necessitates accurate and efficient prediction of electrical load profiles to quantify energy consumption. Therefore, the systematic literature review (SLR), followed by PRISMA guidelines, synthesizes hybrid architectures for sequential electrical load profiles, aiming to span statistical techniques, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) strategies for optimizing performance and practical viability. The findings reveal a dominant trend towards complex hybrid models leveraging the combined strengths of DL architectures such as long short-term memory (LSTM) and optimization algorithms such as genetic algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to capture non-linear relationships. Thus, hybrid models achieve superior performance by synergistically integrating components such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for feature extraction and LSTMs for temporal modeling with feature selection algorithms, which collectively capture local trends, cross-correlations, and long-term dependencies in the data. A crucial challenge identified is the lack of an established framework to manage adaptable output lengths in dynamic neural network forecasting. Addressing this, we propose the first explicit idea of decoupling output length predictions from the core signal prediction task. A key finding is that while models, particularly optimization-tuned hybrid architectures, have demonstrated quantitative superiority over conventional shallow methods, their performance assessment relies heavily on statistical measures like Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). However, for comprehensive performance assessment, there is a crucial need for developing tailored, application-based metrics that integrate system economics and major planning aspects to ensure reliable domain-specific validation.