Smart cities offer new opportunities for urban governance and sustainable development. However, at the current stage, the construction and development of smart cities generally exhibit a technology-driven tendency, neglecting real resident demand, which contradicts the “human-centric” principle. Traditional top-down methods of demand collection struggle to capture the dynamics and heterogeneity of public demand. At the same time, government service platforms, as one dimension of smart city construction, have accumulated massive amounts of user-generated data, providing new solutions for this challenge. This paper aims to construct a big data-driven analytical framework for dynamically identifying and accurately forecasting core resident demand. The study uses Xi’an City, Shaanxi Province, China, as a case study, utilising user messages from People.cn spanning 2011 to 2023. These messages cover various domains, including urban construction, healthcare, education, and transportation, as the data source. The People.cn message board is China’s most significant nationwide online political platform. Its institutionalised feedback mechanism ensures data content focuses on highly representative specific grievances, rather than the broad emotional expressions on social media. The study employs user messages from People.cn from 2011 to 2023 as its data source, encompassing urban construction, healthcare, education, and transportation. First, a large language model (LLM) was used to preprocess and clean the raw data. Subsequently, the BERTopic model was applied to identify ten core demand themes and construct their monthly time series, thereby overcoming the limitations of traditional methods in short-text semantic recognition. Finally, by integrating variational mode decomposition (VMD) with support vector machines (SVMs), a hybrid demand forecasting model was established to mitigate the risk of overfitting in deep learning when forecasting small-sample time series. The empirical results show that the proposed LLM-BERTopic-VMD-SVM framework exhibits excellent performance, with the goodness-of-fit (R2) on various demand themes ranging from 0.93 to 0.96. This study proposes an effective analytical framework for identifying and forecasting resident demand. It provides a decision-support tool for city managers to achieve proactive and fine-grained governance, thereby offering a viable empirical pathway to promote the transformation of smart cities from technology-centric to human-centric.

Data complexity directly affects the dynamics of complex systems, which in turn influences the accuracy and robustness of forecasting models. However, the load data exhibit complex features such as self-similarity, long-term memory, randomness, and chaos. This study aims to quantify and evaluate the complexity features of natural gas loads and to develop a multi-step-ahead forecasting model that integrates data decomposition and ensemble deep learning while considering these complexity features. Firstly, the complexity features of the series are quantified by rolling the fractal dimension, Hurst exponent, sample entropy, and maximum Lyapunov exponent. The analysis contributes to understanding data characteristics and provides information on complex features. Secondly, the ensemble learning eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) can effectively screen complexity features and meteorological factors. Concurrently, variational mode decomposition (VMD) provides frequency-domain decomposition capability, while the gated recurrent unit (GRU) captures long-term dependencies. This synergy enables effective learning of local features and long-term temporal patterns, resulting in precise predictions. The results indicate that compared to other models, the proposed method (XGBoost-VMD-GRU considering complex features) demonstrates superior performance in forecasting, with R² of 0.9922, 0.9860, and 0.9679 for one-step, three-step, and six-step prediction, respectively. This study aims to bring innovative ideas to load forecasting by integrating complex features into the decomposition forecasting framework.

Wind power integration into mountainous power grids amplifies probabilistic forecasting challenges arising from strong non-stationarity, multi-source meteorological redundancy and frequent curtailment events. To address the limitations of existing approaches, this paper proposes a multi-horizon probabilistic forecasting framework integrating multi-perspective entropy-weighted fusion, permutation-entropy-guided decomposition, and residual-anchored probability modelling. First, an Entropy-Weighted Multi-criteria Permutation Feature Importance (EW-MPFI) module fuses KSG mutual information, Tree-SHAP, and elastic-net permutation importance through entropy-based weighted aggregation, distilling 23-dimensional meteorological inputs into eight informative features while suppressing single-criterion bias. Then, a three-stage decomposition strategy applies ICEEMDAN primary decomposition, permutation-entropy and sample-entropy guided band reconstruction, and SSA secondary refinement on high-frequency components, achieving complexity-aligned multi-scale separation. Finally, a decomposition-aware patch-based Transformer backbone (DPC-Former) generates three-quantile point forecasts, upon which an NGBoost residual layer models the conditional distribution via natural-gradient optimization in the information-geometric parameter space. Case studies on a 130 MW mountainous wind farm in Sichuan, China, covering 8736 15-min samples with 566 curtailment samples (6.48% of the dataset), show that, under the partition-wise offline batch-evaluation protocol, the proposed framework achieves an NMAE of 5.21%, an NCRPS of 3.74%, and a PICP80 of 0.84 across forecasting horizons from 15 min to 4 h. Ablation analysis attributes NMAE improvements of 25.36% and 24.57% to the decomposition and feature-selection modules, respectively, while 50-seed ensembling further reduces NCRPS, NMAE, and NRMSE by 7.40%, 7.00%, and 13.70% relative to single-seed training. A fixed-checkpoint test-block diagnostic further shows limited sensitivity at approximately weekly and three-day decomposition cadences, but a material degradation at a one-day cadence. The reported metrics should therefore be interpreted as offline best-case results rather than as performance under strictly causal real-time deployment.

Natural gas plays a key role in the low-carbon energy transition due to its clean and efficient characteristics, yet challenges remain in balancing economic efficiency, user behavior, and carbon emission constraints in demand-side scheduling. This study proposes a low-carbon economic operation model for terminal natural gas systems, integrating price elasticity and differentiated user behavior with carbon emission management strategies. To capture diverse demand patterns, dynamic time warping k-medoids clustering is employed, while scheduling optimization is achieved through a multi-objective framework combining NSGA-III, the entropy weight (EW) method, and the VIKOR decision-making approach. Using real-world data from a gas station in Xi’an, simulation results show that the model reduces gas supply costs by 3.45% for residential users and 6.82% for non-residential users, increases user welfare by 4.64% and 88.87%, and decreases carbon emissions by 115.18 kg and 2156.8 kg, respectively. Moreover, non-residential users achieve an additional reduction in carbon trading costs of 183.85 CNY. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating dynamic price signals, user behavior modeling, and carbon constraints into a unified optimization framework, offering decision support for sustainable and flexible natural gas scheduling.

Against the backdrop of the global energy transition toward deep electrification, the natural gas industry faces challenges, including increased load forecasting uncertainty and frequent extreme weather impacts. To enhance natural gas load forecasting accuracy and support system resilience planning, this study constructs a forecasting model based on quadratic decomposition and hybrid deep learning, incorporating an electricity substitution coefficient to characterize the coupling substitution effect between electricity and natural gas. Under the basic scenario, the VMD-WPD-TCN-BiGRU model is proposed. It employs variational mode decomposition and wavelet packet denoising for secondary signal denoising, combined with a time-series convolutional network and bidirectional gated recurrent unit to extract temporal features. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to mainstream methods such as CNN, BiLSTM, SVM, and XGBoost, this model achieves statistically significant reductions in MSE (11.11–96.21%), MAE (0.89–76.50%), and MAPE (4.10–67.94%), significantly improving forecasting accuracy. In the deep electrification scenario, the introduction of the electricity substitution coefficient further optimizes peak load forecasting for system pressure days under extreme low temperatures, elevating the overall R² to 0.9905 in the deep electrification scenario. Research indicates that the proposed model not only effectively improves the accuracy of short-term natural gas load forecasting but also provides quantitative support for enterprises to plan peak-shaving facilities, optimize pipeline networks, and respond to extreme weather emergencies in data silo environments. This contributes to strengthening the adaptability and long-term resilience of natural gas systems during the energy transition, thereby supporting the sustainable development of energy infrastructure.

The building sector accounts for 40% of global energy consumption and 39% of carbon emissions, with climate change-induced extreme weather exacerbating energy demands and indoor habitability. Addressing this challenge is crucial for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 11 and 13. However, existing research predominantly focuses on single-objective optimizations, lacking systematic multi-objective approaches. This study develops a synergistic optimization model integrating microclimate simulations (ENVI-MET and Grasshopper) with non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II to simultaneously balance thermal comfort, energy consumption, and economic cost. A case study in Hebei Province, China—a temperate monsoon climate region with significant urbanization challenges—demonstrates compelling results: 2–3 °C indoor temperature reduction, 15%–20% energy savings, with only 5%–8% construction cost increase. This research provides a robust, replicable framework empowering architects and planners to optimize sustainable and climate-resilient residential building design.