Industrial kitchen appliance consumption forecasting: Hour-ahead and day-ahead perspectives with post-processing improvements

Forecasting techniques have gained considerable prominence within the electric energy sector. Many studies have been documented in the literature, addressing various facets of the energy grid, ranging from power generation to end-user consumption. However, it is noteworthy that the prediction of individual appliance demand has remained relatively unexplored despite its increasing significance, particularly in modern power grids characterized by a dominant presence of distributed energy resources. In light of this research gap, this work focuses on developing and evaluating methodologies for forecasting active power consumption at the device level in the context of industrial kitchens. Three post-processing algorithms are also proposed to improve the forecasting accuracy by leveraging historical predictions. A comprehensive case study employing sub-metered data from 15 industrial kitchen devices was conducted to validate the proposed methods, spanning both hour-ahead and day-ahead scenarios. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in both forecasting horizons, particularly of the post-processing techniques that show average improvements of over 30% in day-ahead and 50% in hour-ahead, compared to the original predictions.