Day-ahead forecasting approach for energy consumption of an office building using support vector machines

This paper presents a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based approach for energy consumption forecasting. The proposed approach includes the combination of both the historic log of past consumption data and the history of contextual information. By combining variables that influence the electrical energy consumption, such as the temperature, luminosity, seasonality, with the log of consumption data, it is possible for the proposed method by find patterns and correlations between the different sources of data and therefore improves the forecasting performance. A case study based on real data from a pilot microgrid located at the GECAD campus in the Polytechnic of Porto is presented. Data from the pilot buildings are used, and the results are compared to those achieved by several states of the art forecasting approaches. Results show that the proposed method can reach lower forecasting errors than the other considered methods.