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A Comprehensive Survey of Short-Term Load Forecasting: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends

  • Jihoon Moon (Duksung Women's Univ., Dept. of Data Science)
  • Received : 2025.05.11
  • Accepted : 2025.06.19
  • Published : 2025.06.30

Abstract

Short-term load forecasting (STLF) is the process of predicting electricity usage from a few minutes to a few days in advance. STLF is essential for platform-based energy management systems (EMSs) because it enables accurate demand prediction, real-time scheduling, and adaptive control. Due to the growing complexity of electricity usage patterns and the abundance of high-resolution sensor data, forecasting models must efficiently handle nonlinear, multivariate, and nonstationary time series on a large scale. This paper thoroughly reviews STLF techniques ranging from traditional statistical models, such as the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, to advanced deep learning approaches including long short-term memory (LSTM) models, gated recurrent unit (GRU) models, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), temporal convolutional networks (TCNs), and Transformerbased architectures. It also covers hybrid and ensemble strategies, performance enhancement methods, benchmark datasets, and evaluation metrics. It emphasizes the practical integration of STLF into intelligent energy platforms and highlights industrial use cases and emerging trends, such as explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), model compression, and federated learning (FL). The goal of this survey is to provide researchers and practitioners with a framework for selecting and implementing STLF solutions that are accurate, scalable, interpretable, and platform-ready.

Keywords

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