Transformer based day-ahead cooling load forecasting of hub airport air-conditioning systems with thermal energy storage

The air conditioning system constitutes more than half of the total energy demand in hub airport buildings. To enhance the energy efficiency and to enable intelligent energy management, it is vital to build an accurate cooling load prediction model. However, the current models face challenges in dealing with dispersed load patterns and lack interpretability when black box approaches are adopted. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel k-means-Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) based hybrid load prediction model. Specifically, the daily load patterns are grouped using an improved k-means clustering method that considers both input feature weights and dynamic time warping (DTW) distances. Additionally, the statistical features of the clustering output are inputted into the TFT. By further incorporating context information, the integration of data between different schema categories is achieved, thus reducing errors that may occur during the transition process. As a result, the prediction performance and interpretability are significantly improved. The Chongqing Jiangbei Airport T3A terminal is used as a case study, and experiments are conducted using cooling data from the No.1 energy station, as well as the airport traffic data and the meteorological station data. Results are compared with other mainstream models, confirming that the proposed day-ahead load forecasting model achieves improvements in several performance indicators, including MAE, MAPE, CV-RMSE, and R2, which are 384 kW, 3%, 5%, and 0.058 respectively.