MATNet: Multi-Level Fusion Transformer-Based Model for Day-Ahead PV Generation Forecasting

Accurate forecasting of renewable generation is crucial to facilitate the integration of Renewable Energy Sources into the power system. Focusing on photovoltaic (PV) units, forecasting methods can be divided into two main categories: physics-based and data-based strategies, with Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based models providing state-of-the-art performance. However, while these AI-based models can capture complex patterns and relationships in the data, they ignore the underlying physical prior knowledge of the phenomenon. Therefore, in this paper, we propose MATNet, a novel transformer-based multimodal architecture for multi-step day-ahead PV power generation forecasting. The model is fed with historical PV data and historical and forecast weather data through a multi-level joint fusion approach, employing a soft-attention mechanism at multiple fusion stages. We evaluate the effectiveness of MATNet on the Ausgrid benchmark dataset, where it significantly outperforms various baseline models, achieving an RMSE of 0.0445, corresponding to a relative improvement of approximately 65% compared to the best-performing baseline method. The analysis is further enriched by a comprehensive set of ablation studies, a sensitivity analysis on missing data, which highlights MATNet's resilience to input degradation, a cross-site zero-shot generalization evaluation on five external PV datasets, demonstrating MATNet's robustness under significant domain shifts, and an assessment of the model's computational complexity, confirming its favorable balance between predictive accuracy and computational efficiency. These results highlight MATNet's potential as a reliable and efficient solution to facilitate the integration of PV energy into the power grid. The code is available at https://github.com/arco-group/MATNet.