Deep Reinforcement Learning-Assisted Federated Learning for Robust Short-term Utility Demand Forecasting in Electricity Wholesale Markets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel DRL-assisted federated learning framework, DearFSAC, to improve short-term electricity demand forecasting accuracy and robustness in wholesale markets despite data privacy concerns and model defects.

Contribution

It proposes a new federated learning approach enhanced with deep reinforcement learning and auto-encoding to handle defects and accelerate training convergence.

Findings

DearFSAC outperforms existing methods in accuracy.

The approach maintains robustness under defect conditions.

Auto-encoder improves convergence speed.

Abstract

Short-term load forecasting (STLF) plays a significant role in the operation of electricity trading markets. Considering the growing concern of data privacy, federated learning (FL) is increasingly adopted to train STLF models for utility companies (UCs) in recent research. Inspiringly, in wholesale markets, as it is not realistic for power plants (PPs) to access UCs' data directly, FL is definitely a feasible solution of obtaining an accurate STLF model for PPs. However, due to FL's distributed nature and intense competition among UCs, defects increasingly occur and lead to poor performance of the STLF model, indicating that simply adopting FL is not enough. In this paper, we propose a DRL-assisted FL approach, DEfect-AwaRe federated soft actor-critic (DearFSAC), to robustly train an accurate STLF model for PPs to forecast precise short-term utility electricity demand. Firstly. we design a STLF model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) using just historical load data and time data. Furthermore, considering the uncertainty of defects occurrence, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm is adopted to assist FL by alleviating model degradation caused by defects. In addition, for faster convergence of FL training, an auto-encoder is designed for both dimension reduction and quality evaluation of uploaded models. In the simulations, we validate our approach on real data of Helsinki's UCs in 2019. The results show that DearFSAC outperforms all the other approaches no matter if defects occur or not.