Cost‐Optimal Building Energy System Scheduling Integrating Solar Irradiance Forecasting via LSTM‐Attention‐TCN Model
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: ABSTRACT Building energy systems integrating multiple energy sources can effectively reduce energy consumption and facilitate renewable energy integration. Integrating electrical energy storage (EES) into these systems helps accommodate the increasing share of renewables; however, the stochastic and intermittent nature of solar power still poses challenges to supply reliability. This study proposes a photovoltaic (PV)‐oriented storage scheduling strategy, in which short‐term PV generation forecasts are applied to guide the operation of a building power supply network consisting of photovoltaic panels, the grid, and energy storage systems. The forecasting approach employs a hybrid framework combining a Long Short‐Term Memory (LSTM) network to capture temporal dependencies, an attention mechanism to emphasise critical time steps, and a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to map the enhanced features to PV outputs. Experimental evaluation using historical datasets under multiple weather conditions and time periods shows that the proposed LSTM‐Attention‐TCN model achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 20.45 W/m 2 and a Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) of 0.94, outperforming both standalone LSTM and TCN models as well as their hybrid variants in terms of accuracy and robustness. By providing high‐accuracy solar irradiance forecasts to guide energy storage operation and grid interaction, the proposed model enables more efficient and economical scheduling of building energy systems. Compared with an uncontrolled scenario, the LSTM‐Attention‐TCN‐based scheduling reduces the total operating cost by approximately 52.1%, and achieves an additional 16.5% reduction compared to a conventional strategy without predictive coordination. In addition, compared to other hybrid forecasting models such as LSTM‐TCN and TCN‐Attention, the proposed model achieves the lowest total cost of CNY 14.83 and demonstrates superior scheduling efficiency, thereby enhancing the stability and flexibility of building energy utilization.
DOI: 10.1049/cit2.70128
Authors: Zhengtian Wu, Jianyu Li, Yang Gao, Chuangyin Dang, Chao Tang, Yuansheng Li, Xinmiao Wang, Jinpeng Chen, Hongbo Gao, Xinyin Xu
Institutions: City University of Hong Kong, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Beijing Satellite Navigation Center, University of Science and Technology of China, National University of Defense Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Anhui Jianzhu University, Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology
Language: English
Topic: Smart Grid Energy Management
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,760
Award: G5279032029
OpenAlex ID: W7147334239