Power forecasting has a guiding effect on power-aware scheduling strategies to reduce unnecessary power consumption in data centers. Many metrics related to power consumption can be collected in physical servers, such as the status of CPU, memory, and other components. However, most existing methods empirically exploit a small number of metrics to forecast power consumption. To this end, this article uses feature selection based on causality to explore the metrics that strongly influence the power consumption of different tasks. Moreover, we propose a tensor-based dual-stage attention LSTM to forecast the non-linear and non-periodic power consumption. In the proposed model, a multi-way delay embedding transform is utilized to convert the time series into tensors along the temporal direction. The LSTM combines with the tensor technique and the attention mechanism to capture the temporal pattern effectively. In addition, we adopt the cost-sensitive loss function to optimize the specific power forecasting problem in data centers. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve up to 1.4% to 4.3% forecasting accuracy improvement compared with the state-of-the-art models.

Virtualization technologies provide solutions for cloud computing. Virtual resource scheduling is a crucial task in data centers, and the power consumption of virtual resources is a critical foundation of virtualization scheduling. Containers are the smallest unit of virtual resource scheduling and migration. Although many practical models for estimating the power consumption of virtual machines (VMs) have been proposed, few power estimation models of containers have been put forth. In this paper, we propose a fast-training piecewise regression model based on a decision tree for VM power metering and estimate the power of containers configured on the VM by treating the container as a group of processes on the VM. We select appropriate features from the collected metrics of VMs/containers to help our model fit the nonlinear relationship between power and features well. Besides, we optimize the leaf nodes of the regression tree, realizing the effective power metering of virtualization environments. We evaluate the proposed model on 13 tasks in PARSEC and compare it with several commonly used models in data centers. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed model, and the estimated power of containers is in line with expectations.

Long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) is critical for modern power systems, energy management, and grid planning. Yet virtually all existing forecasting models employ stationary activation functions that apply identical nonlinear mappings regardless of temporal context—a fundamental mismatch with real-world load data, which exhibits strongly regime-dependent dynamics such as summer demand peaks, winter heating patterns, and overnight low-load periods. We address this gap by proposing TC-KAN (Time-Conditioned Kolmogorov–Arnold Network), the first forecasting architecture to augment KAN activation functions with position-aware coefficient parameterisation. The core innovation replaces the static polynomial coefficients in standard KAN activations with position-conditioned coefficients produced by a lightweight positional-embedding MLP, providing additional learnable capacity beyond standard KAN while adding negligible parameter overhead. TC-KAN further integrates a dual-pathway processing block—combining depthwise convolution for local temporal pattern extraction with the time-conditioned KAN layer for enhanced nonlinear transformation—within a channel-independent framework with Reversible Instance Normalisation. Experiments were conducted on four standard ETT benchmark datasets and the high-dimensional Weather dataset. TC-KAN achieves superior or competitive accuracy in most configurations while requiring merely 51K parameters—approximately 40% of DLinear and ∼100× fewer than iTransformer. On ETTh2, TC-KAN reduces the mean squared error by up to 61.4% over DLinear, and matches the current state-of-the-art iTransformer on ETTm2 at a fraction of the computational cost. This extreme parameter reduction circumvents the steep memory bottlenecks endemic to massive Transformer models, positioning TC-KAN as a highly practical architecture tailored precisely for resource-constrained edge deployments—such as on-device load forecasting inside smart grid sensors and industrial IoT controllers.