Short-term load forecasting (STLF) is fundamental for the proper operation of power systems, as it finds its use in various basic processes. Therefore, advanced calculation techniques are needed to obtain accurate results of the consumption prediction, taking into account the numerous exogenous factors that influence the results’ precision. The purpose of this study is to integrate, additionally to the conventional factors (weather, holidays, etc.), the current aspects regarding the global COVID-19 pandemic in solving the STLF problem, using a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model. To evaluate and validate the impact of the new variables considered in the model, the simulations are conducted using publicly available data from the Romanian power system. A comparison study is further carried out to assess the performance of the proposed model, using the multiple linear regression method and load forecasting results provided by the Romanian Transmission System Operator (TSO). In this regard, the Mean Squared Error (MSE), the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), and the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) are used as evaluation indexes. The proposed methodology shows great potential, as the results reveal better error values compared to the TSO results, despite the limited historical data.

This paper presents the implementation and evaluation of a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture applied to the power engineering domain. A scanned Romanian textbook on the reliability of energy installations serves as input data, requiring Optical Character Recognition (OCR) preprocessing. The extracted text has been segmented into chunks, embedded using a sentence-transformer model, and indexed in a FAISS vector database, with GPT-4o used for generation. The embedding space analysis reveals distinct thematic clusters, confirming semantic coherence despite OCR-induced noise. The evaluation results demonstrate that RAG architectures can provide valuable domain-specific insights even when operating on imperfect legacy engineering documentation.

High-precision time-series forecasting allows companies to better allocate resources, improve their competitiveness, and increase revenues. In most real-world cases, however, time series are highly volatile and cannot be used for forecasting together with classical statistical methods, which usually yield errors of around 30% or even more. Thus, the goal of this work is to present an approach to obtaining day-ahead forecasts of electricity consumption based on such volatile time series, along with data preprocessing for volatility attenuation. For a thorough understanding, predictions were computed using various methods based on either Artificial Intelligence or purely statistical algorithms. The architectures based on the Transformer were optimized through Brute Force, while the N-BEATS architecture was optimized with Brute Force and OPTUNA because of the highly stochastic nature of the time series. The best method was based on an Encoder-only Transformer, which resulted in an approximate prediction error of 11.63%—far below the error of about 30% usually accepted in current practice. In addition, a procedure was developed to determine the maximum theoretical Pearson Correlation Coefficient between forecast and actual power demand.