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Specialist vs Generalist: A Transformer Architecture for Global Forecasting Energy Time Series

Time series forecasting is a critical requirement for the optimal operation of energy grids, systems, and platforms, where the forecasting challenge itself can span across energy consumption, renewables generation, and energy utilisation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and models have been leveraged to predict these time series forecasts with increasing levels of accuracy. In contrast to local models that are developed separately for each time series, Global Models, which are trained across many sets of time series drawing on characteristics of ’relatedness’, have produced more accurate forecasts. In this paper, we propose a transformer architecture based global model as a generalist forecaster of energy time series data, where we frame a sequence forecasting model and represent numerical values of the corresponding time series as vector embeddings in this model. We evaluate this transformer architecture based global model on real-world time-series energy data generated by the La Trobe Energy AI platform (LEAP), a functional and operational microgrid deployed in the multicampus tertiary education setting of La Trobe University, Australia. The results of these experiments confirm that the proposed generalist forecasting approach outperforms specialist local models trained on individual time series. We also demonstrate the ability of this approach to forecast dissimilar time series from the same model.