Bayesian Spatiotemporal Gaussian Process for Short-term Load Forecasting Using Combined Transportation and Electricity Data

Smart cities can be viewed as large-scale Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) where different sensors and devices record the cyber and physical indicators of the city systems. The collected data are used for improving urban life by offering services such as accurate electric load forecasting, and more efficient traffic management. Traditional monitoring for electricity and transportation networks generally do not provide full observability due to their limited coverage as well as high implementation and maintenance costs. For example, continuous traffic data collection is mostly limited to major highways only in big cities, whereas local roadways are usually covered once or twice a year. Also, there are no high-fidelity and real-time electric monitoring systems in all parts of power distribution networks. Combining the limited data from each of the urban systems together (e.g., electricity, transportation, environment, etc.) provides a better picture of the energy flow in a city. Furthermore, a city should be considered as a collection of the layers of tangled infrastructure networks, which connects people, places, and resources. Therefore, the study of traffic or electricity consumption forecasting should go beyond the transportation and electricity networks and merge with each other and even with other city networks such as environmental networks. As such, this article proposes a Bayesian spatiotemporal Gaussian Process model that employs the most informative spatiotemporal interdependency among different interconnected networks (in this case, electricity, transportation, and weather). The proposed load forecasting method is compared with other state-of-the-art methods using real-life data obtained from the City of Tallahassee in Florida. Results show that the proposed Bayesian spatiotemporal Gaussian Process model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.