# Short-term load forecasting under EU-AI Act Requirements in Safety-Critical Environments: Results from a 41-day live challenge on the aggregated German transmission-grid load

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05018 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05018/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07815/) (2024)
- [Chronos-2: From Univariate to Universal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15821/) (2025)
- [Forecast Evaluation for Data Scientists: Common Pitfalls and Best Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10716/) (2022)
- [Criteria for Classifying Forecasting Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03523/) (2022)
- [Do We Really Need Deep Learning Models for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02118/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Short-term load forecasting (STLF) plays a vital role in the electric power industry. It is relevant for critical infrastructure. STLF is no longer purely a performance and accuracy problem, because determinism, fail-safe handling, minimal-attack surface, and no dead code are software-engineering requirements rather than optional extras. This report describes results from a 41-day live challenge that evaluated an STLF pipeline for the aggregated German transmission-grid load. The STLF pipeline predicts the 24 hourly load values of a target day from European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) data. It is based on the open-source Python library spotforecast2-safe, which tries to implement the EU-AI Act Requirements in Safety-Critical Environments by design. The STLF pipeline includes gap- and anomaly-aware data preprocessing, calendar and weather covariates, and a forecasting algorithm. Forecast quality is compared to the official ENTSO-E day-ahead forecast. The spotforecast2-safe pipeline beats the ENTSO-E baseline. In-context models show competitive performance. Transparent, deterministic, low-cost, and auditable local models (referred to as macl2l in this report) are competitive with more than 100-million-parameter large, energy-intensive pre-trained foundation models such as chronos-2. The challenge implementation, the submission history of all teams, and the archived leaderboard are publicly available.