Deep Learning for Short-term Instant Energy Consumption Forecasting in the Manufacturing Sector

Electricity is a volatile power source that requires great planning and resource management for both short and long term. More specifically, in the short-term, accurate instant energy consumption forecasting contributes greatly to improve the efficiency of buildings, opening new avenues for the adoption of renewable energy. In that regard, data-driven approaches, namely the ones based on machine learning, are begin to be preferred over more traditional ones since they provide not only more simplified ways of deployment but also state of the art results. In that sense, this work applies and compares the performance of several deep learning algorithms, LSTM, CNN, mixed CNN-LSTM and TCN, in a real testbed within the manufacturing sector. The experimental results suggest that the TCN is the most reliable method for predicting instant energy consumption in the short-term.