Short-Term Mosques Load Forecast Using Machine Learning and Meteorological Data

The tendency toward achieving more sustainable and green buildings turned several passive buildings into more dynamic ones.Mosques are the type of buildings that have a unique energy usage pattern.Nevertheless,these types of buildings have minimal consideration in the ongoing energy efficiency applications.This is due to the unpredictability in the electrical consumption of the mosques affecting the stability of the distribution networks.Therefore,this study addresses this issue by developing a framework for a short-term electricity load forecast for a mosque load located in Riyadh,Saudi Arabia.In this study,and by harvesting the load consumption of the mosque and meteorological datasets,the performance of four forecasting algorithms is investigated,namely Artificial Neural Network and Support Vector Regression(SVR)based on three kernel functions:Radial Basis(RB),Polynomial,and Linear.In addition,this research work examines the impact of 13 different combinations of input attributes since selecting the optimal features has a major influence on yielding precise forecasting outcomes.For the mosque load,the(SVR-RB)with eleven features appeared to be the best forecasting model with the lowest forecasting errors metrics giving RMSE,nRMSE,MAE,and nMAE values of 4.207 kW,2.522%,2.938 kW,and 1.761%,respectively.

A new model for predicting the total tree height for stems cut-to-length by harvesters in Pinus radiata plantations

A new model for predicting the total tree height for harvested stems from cut-to-length(CTL)harvester data was constructed for Pinus radiata(D.Don)following a conceptual analysis of relative stem profi les,comparisons of candidate models forms and extensive selections of predictor variables.Stem profi les of more than 3000 trees in a taper data set were each processed 6 times through simulated log cutting to generate the data required for this purpose.The CTL simulations not only mimicked but also covered the full range of cutting patterns of nearly 0.45×106 stems harvested during both thinning and harvesting operations.The single-equation model was estimated through the multipleequation generalized method of moments estimator to obtain effi cient and consistent parameter estimates in the presence of error correlation and heteroscedasticity that were inherent to the systematic structure of the data.The predictive performances of our new model in its linear and nonlinear form were evaluated through a leave-one-tree-out cross validation process and compared against that of the only such existing model.The evaluations and comparisons were made through benchmarking statistics both globally over the entire data space and locally within specifi c subdivisions of the data space.These statistics indicated that the nonlinear form of our model was the best and its linear form ranked second.The prediction accuracy of our nonlinear model improved when the total log length represented more than 20%of the total tree height.The poorer performance of the existing model was partly attributed to the high degree of multicollinearity among its predictor variables,which led to highly variable and unstable parameter estimates.Our new model will facilitate and widen the utilization of harvester data far beyond the current limited use for monitoring and reporting log productions in P.radiata plantations.It will also facilitate the estimation of bark thickness and help make harvester data a potential source of taper data to reduce the intensity and cost of the conventional destructive taper sampling in the fi eld.Although developed for P.radiata,the mathematical form of our new model will be applicable to other tree species for which CTL harvester data are routinely captured during thinning and harvesting operations.