Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037

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Journal of Cleaner Production

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro

PV-Net: An innovative deep learning approach for efficient forecasting

of short-term photovoltaic energy production
Mohamed Abdel-Basset a, Hossam Hawash a, *, Ripon K. Chakrabortty b, Michael Ryan b
a
Faculty of Computers and Informatics, Zagazig University, Zagazig, Sharqiyah, 44519, Egypt
b
Capability Systems Centre, School of Engineering and IT, UNSW, Canberra, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Although photovoltaic (PV) energy production offers several environmental and commercial advantages,
Received 9 January 2021 the irregular nature of PV energy can challenge the design and development of the energy management
Received in revised form systems. Precise forecasting for PV energy production is therefore of vital importance to supply con-
12 March 2021
sumers to improve trust in functionality of the energy management system. Stimulated by current de-
Accepted 6 April 2021
Available online 12 April 2021
velopments in deep learning (DL) techniques as well as the promising efficiency in energy-related
applications, this study introduces a novel DL architecture, called PV-Net, for short-term forecasting of
Handling editor: Mingzhou Jin day-ahead PV energy. In PV-Net, the gates of the gated recurrent unit (GRU) are redesigned using
convolutional layers (called Conv-GRU) to enable efficient extraction of positional and temporal char-
Keywords: acteristics in the PV power sequences. The Conv-GRU cells are stacked in bidirectional (Bi-dir) blocks to
Photovoltaic energy enable modeling temporal information in forward and backward directions. The Bi-dir block is residually
Deep learning connected to avoid information loss across layers and to facilitate gradient flow during training. A real-
Short-term forecasting world case study from Alice Springs, Australia, is employed to evaluate and compare the performance of
Convolution gated recurrent units
the proposed PV-Net against recent cutting-edge approaches. The values of four performance measures
Residual learning
demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed PV-Net in terms of prediction precision and consistency.
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Photovoltaic (PV) energy production is one of the preferred
renewable power sources that has attracted increasing global in-
terest in recent years (Sharadga et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2019). The
efficient production, communication, delivery, and consumption of
electrical energy are reliant on instantaneous management
(Heidari and Khovalyg, 2020), such that PV energy production
schemes are accessible on both the production and load sides (Lee
and Kim, 2020). PV energy requires instantaneous management
because the solar energy source is subject to arbitrary oscillations
and ambiguities, imposing considerable.
Challenges on the operation of the power system (Wang et al.,
2020c). For example, during hazy weather, the solar irradiance on
PV units is variable due to the movement of cloud formations,
causing rapid variations on the PV units resulting in variations in
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: mohamedbasset@zu.edu.eg (M. Abdel-Basset), hossamreda@
zu.edu.eg (H. Hawash), r.chakrabortty@adfa.edu.au (R.K. Chakrabortty), m.ryan@
adfa.edu.au (M. Ryan).
energy production (Pan et al., 2020). Thus, the growing number of
PV energy sources in smart grids results in substantial variations in
energy production and consumption, leading to regularity devia-
tion, voltage increase, and many other issues that require some
means of preserving the active equilibrium between consumer’s
needs and provider’s supplies (Shi et al., 2020). Numerous solutions
have been offered, involving energy system planning, dispatches
(Guo et al., 2021), need reply (Roth et al., 2020), battery storage
(Guo et al., 2021), and backup generators. Nevertheless, many
challenges remain unsolved.
These obstacles include the vulnerability of the PV energy
output to meteorological circumstances, high-level machinery ex-
penses, and fluctuations in energy production (Wang et al., 2020c).
Prediction of PV energy production has emerged as an intelligent
way for tackling such obstacles and the reliable prediction of the
production of PV energy has been identified as a necessary
precondition to extensive PV deployment in power systems (Shi
et al., 2020). Such prediction is difficult, however, as PV energy
sequences are typically irregular and complex due to unpredictable
meteorological circumstances. The energy rise/drop ratio of backup
generators is constrained with the entity ramp level, causing many

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.127037
0959-6526/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037

Nomenclature and units ECMWF European Centre for Medium-Range Weather

Forecasts
PV photovoltaic (PV) RGB red, green blue
LTPVF long-term PV energy forecasting GHI global horizontal irradiance
MTPVF middle-term PV energy forecasting MA moving average
STPVF short-term PV energy forecasting AR auto regressive
ML Machine Learning GA genetic algorithm
ARMA autoregressive and moving average SDA similar day analysis
ARIMA autoregressive integrated moving average ANNs artificial neural networks
SARIMA seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average LRC linear regressive correction
SVM support vector machine ACO ant colony optimization
ELM extreme learning machine DOEs design of experiments
AI artificial intelligence IDBN improved deep belief network
CNNs convolutional neural networks WPD wavelet packet decomposition
RNN Recurrent Neural Network AM attention mechanism
LSTM Long Short-Term Memory AE Autoencoder
GRU Gated Recurrent Unit QCNN quantile CNN
DERs dispersed energy resources QR quantile regression
SG smart grid ConvLSTM convolutional LSTM
SI solar irradiation BN Batch Normalization
Bi-Dir bi-directional DKASC Desert Knowledge Precinct in Central Australia
NWP numerical weather prediction MSE Mean Squared Error
GDAS Global Data Assimilation System MAE Mean Absolute Error
CFS Climate Forecast System MAPE Mean Absolute Percentage Error
GFS Global Forecast System RMSE Root Mean Square Error

issues in fulfilling the increasing demand for energy production
(Huang et al., 2020). In the case of battery resources, very large
energy storage capacity is difficult to achieve due to production
expenses and storing volume constraints. Further, the unavailabil-
ity of data about user consumption means that it is challenging to
balance demand with supply (Bullich-Massague
et al., 2020).
Similarly, the efficacy of such solutions essentially depends on the
precision of prediction in different time horizons, thereby sup-
porting day-ahead planning for the grid (Theocharides et al., 2020).
Precise prediction offers the ability to manage arbitrary PV energy
on the smart grid (Shi et al., 2020), as well as enable data provision
for demand and to extend the amenity lifetime of standby batteries
by reducing periods of charge and release (Guo et al., 2021).
A number of research efforts have concentrated on the efficiency
of predicting PV energy production and several predictive ap-
proaches have been introduced (Ahmed et al., 2020; Bullich-
Massague
et al., 2020; Huang et al., 2020; Moreira et al., 2021).
These methods can be split into three categories according to the
prediction time horizon: long-term PV energy forecasting (LTPVF),
middle-term PV energy forecasting (MTPVF), and short-term PV
energy forecasting (STPVF) (Han et al., 2019; Heidari and Khovalyg,
2020). LTPVF approaches consider from a single month to twelve
months; MTPVF approaches focus on a span of seven to thirty days;
and STPVF approaches describe the timeframe of a single week or a
smaller amount. LTPVF assists in managing long-standing PV en-
ergy production, communication, and delivery, and guarantees the
trustworthy function of the energy management system; MTPVF
supports decisions relating to the mid-term forwarding of the po-
wer management system and STPVF approaches support energy
management and consequently improve the trustworthiness of the
energy management system (Oh et al., 2020).
Current PV energy forecasting approaches can be categorized
into four main groups: physical approaches, persistence ap-
proaches, statistical or machine learning (ML) approaches, and
deep learning (DL) approaches (Theocharides et al., 2020) Physical
methods employ scientific calculations to define the dynamic
movement and physical state of climatological circumstances, but
the predictive performance of these approaches depends heavily on
the stability of meteorological conditions. Persistence approaches
generally suppose a high association between current and forth-
coming values of the temporal energy data which are computed
presuming that the surroundings stay unaltered from the timestep
t to time t þ Dt (Mayer and Gro
f, 2020). However, the predictive
performance of these approaches heavily relies on ancient mean
values (Roth et al., 2020). ML approaches seek to learn and model
the association between ancient PV energy productions and the
relevant meteorological factors, which in turn mean that the pre-
dictive performance of ML approaches is very sensitive to the
temporal distance and the fineness of received input.
Consequently, a variety of statistical approaches have been
widely adopted in PV energy forecasting in recent years involving:
autoregressive and moving average (ARMA), autoregressive inte-
grated moving average (ARIMA) (Liu et al., 2012), seasonal ARIMA
(SARIMA) (Sharadga et al., 2020), regression techniques (Müller
and Trutnevyte, 2020), support vector machine (SVM) (Pan et al.,
2020), and extreme learning machine (ELM) (Zhou et al., 2020).
Nevertheless, some statistical approaches still have a number of
limitations that need to be addressed, such as the requirement of
the ARMA method for stationarity of the temporal input. Through
the rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), DL approaches have
been adopted to solve the limitations of traditional ML in many
research fields (Shi et al., 2017). In this context, convolutional
neural networks (CNNs) (Huang and Wei, 2020) have been
employed for PV energy forecasting due to their powerful feature
extraction capability. Recurrent networks such as recurrent neural
networks (RNN) (Lee and Kim, 2020), Long Short-term Memory
(LSTM) (Ma et al., 2020), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) (Liu et al.,
2019) have also been employed to model temporal representations.
Compared with the traditional physical, persistence, and ML ap-
proaches, DL models have the ability to extract and model so-
phisticated deep features inherent in the time series of PV energy,
which results in a more efficient forecaster. Thus, this study focuses

2
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al.
on investigating a new DL framework to predict PV energy
production.
The usage of dispersed energy resources (DERs) has been widely
adopted in numerous countries because of recent advances in
smart grid (SG) technology, which means that renewable energy
(including PV power) is likely to be the main form of power in the
coming years. Consequently, there is a growing need for instanta-
neous consistency as well as safety of PV energy systems with the
increase in PV energy production within the SG. As a consequence,
developing an efficient predictive technique for PV energy pro-
duction has become of great interest. Several studies concentrate
on architectural development and the tuning of parameters of
prediction techniques, which usually achieve better forecasts than
conventional techniques. Nonetheless, some forecasting ap-
proaches become trapped in local minima or saturation points and
are unable to realize acceptable performance because of the very
unstable nature of the production of PV energy, particularly during
rainy and cloudy weather (Feng et al., 2020). Since the features of
PV energy sequences are nonstationary and nonuniform, precise
and constant prediction outcomes cannot be realized when the
original PV energy data is simply exploited by the forecasting
approach, specifically with volatile meteorological conditions.
Therefore, traditional approaches for PV energy prediction are
unable to achieve the robust forecasting performance required for
the design of reliable power systems. Several studies have
employed DL approaches to fine-tune the efficiency of PV energy
prediction or pertinent aspects (e.g., solar irradiation (SI)) (Kim
et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020a, 2020c). However, these ap-
proaches emphasize only the PV energy sequence itself and over-
look the meteorological aspects which are closely associated with
PV energy production. In areas with varied atmospheric conditions,
these approaches cannot detect deviations in PV energy, principally
in the case of small-time intervals, which are challenging to learn
from historical data only.
A. Challenges and research gaps
A comprehensive study of recent literature for PV energy fore-
casting revealed a number of critical challenges to afford reliable
prediction performance of the PV energy. This paper aims to
address the following challenges:
 PV energy production is associated with three irradiances of
diffuse i.e., extraterrestrial SI, direct normal irradiance, and
horizontal irradiance: and with a variety of meteorological
conditions (i.e., humidity, temperature, etc.). Thus, integrating
PV energy collection with current renewable energy systems is a
considerable challenge that necessitates a new approach that is
able to recognize the complicated data characteristics (Lee and
Kim, 2020; Shi et al., 2020).
 Assimilating PV energy systems to fulfil the growing electrical
needs without utilizing energy backup storage is technologically
infeasible since such systems influence grid constancy. Specif-
ically, alterations in climatological conditions cause ambiguity
in PV production (Lee and Kim, 2020) such as triggering irreg-
ular breakthroughs, voltage rises, opposite energy streams, and
diversities in voltage waveforms and frequency deformation.
This volatile production impacts the dependability, steadiness,
and planning of the energy system. Consistent forecasting for
the PV energy production will considerably decrease this un-
certainty, improve solidity, and enhance commercial sustain-
ability. Thus, developing an efficient STPVF has become a critical
research field in recent years (Dairi et al., 2020; Heidari and
Khovalyg, 2020).
3
Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037
 Traditional statistical prediction approaches have the potential
to become trapped in local minimum and are unable to achieve
acceptable results, due to the erratic nature of PV energy pro-
duction, particularly during hazy and wet periods. Due to the
non-uniform and unsteady characteristics of the PV energy se-
quences, precise and steady forecasts cannot be acquired when
the initial PV energy data is explicitly passed to the prediction
approach, specifically with volatile climatology. As a result,
traditional STPVF approaches are unsuited to achieve acceptable
prediction performance for current energy management sys-
tems (Dairi et al., 2020; Li et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2019).
B. Novelty and contributions
To bridge the present research gap and overcome the above-
mentioned challenges, this study introduces a new DL architecture,
called PV-Net, for short-term PV energy forecasting. The contri-
butions of this work are:
 An innovative deep learning framework is introduced for STPVF,
called PV-Net. The proposed PV-Net aims to process the his-
torical PV time series by redesigning the gates of the GRU cell
using dilated convolutional operation, hence capturing posi-
tional information at the same time as modeling temporal
characteristics of input sequences.
 The Conv-GRU cells are stacked in a bi-directional (Bi-Dir)
manner to process PV information in both forward and back-
ward directions.
 To improve gradient flow and prevent missing information in
later layers, a novel residual Conv-GRU module is designed,
where the residual link is implemented using one-dimensional
convolution.
 Fair and extensive comparative experimentations on public case
studies demonstrated the practical and statistical proficiency of
the PV-Net outperforming the recent cutting-edge deep
learning approaches for energy prediction.
 The correlation between forecasting error and various length of
input intervals and seasonal changes are discussed, which
further demonstrates the stability and flexibility of PV-Net for
various chronological data in the project design.
C. The study planning
The remainder of this work is organized as follows: Section 2
discusses the recent literature relevant to short-term forecasting
of PV energy. Section 3 discusses the design and the building of the
proposed PV-Net, parameters, and relevant training. Section 4
presents the experiments, results, analysis, and the discussion.
Section 5 introduces the key limitations of this study and, finally,
the conclusions of this study and future directions of work are
introduced in Section 6.
2. Related work
This section outlines the most recent and pertinent research,
classifying the PV forecasting approaches into four main categories:
physical approaches, persistent approaches, ML approaches, and DL
approaches.
A. Physical approaches
Physical approaches include orography, impediment, tempera-
ture, surface roughness, pressure, obstructions, and disruption of
weather for future forecasts (Mayer and Gro
f, 2020). These ap-
proaches are mostly more trustworthy when used for long-term
prediction (Han et al., 2019) and can be divided into two primary
subcategories according to the scale: mesoscale approaches and
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al.
global-scale approaches. Meso-scale approaches consider the at-
mospheric characteristics in a limited region such as provinces,
states, territories, or continents (Lee and Kim, 2020); while global-
scale approaches consider the weather features at a universal scale.
For example, the numerical weather prediction (NWP) method
integrates atmospheric calculations and meteorological conditions
for forecasting. For these global NWP methods, around fifteen
climate services accessible for operative data acquisition including
the Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS), Climate Forecast
System (CFS), Global Forecast System (GFS), etc. they are dominated
by governments or funding corporations like the European Centre
for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). These NWP
techniques predict weather conditions for over fifteen days in the
future (Ahmed et al., 2020; Huang et al., 2020), then employ
concurrently a group of mathematical calculations for tangible
conditions and the dynamic attributes of the atmosphere (Roth
et al., 2020).
Reliable PV energy forecasts can be achieved by these ap-
proaches when the meteorological conditions remain stable,
however erroneous forecasts result in cases of rapid fluctuations in
meteorological conditions. In (Wang et al., 2020b), the authors
introduced a novel surface irradiance mapping technique for
minute-level PV energy prediction, where the mapping correlation
between SI and sky image is modeled by extracting the
redegreeneblue (RGB) units and the pixel-wise information in the
sky images. In (Mayer and Gro
f, 2020), the authors contrasted the
accomplishment of nine beam and diffuse separation methods for
physical PV energy forecasting based on the computation of nu-
merical weather data. The study included ERBS(Erbs et al., 1982),
SKARTVEIT (Skartveit and Olseth, 1987), DISC(Bird and Hulstrom,
1981), DIRINT (Ineichen et al., 1992), DIRINDEX (Perez et al.,
2002), BRL (Ridley et al., 2010), ENGERER (Engerer, 2015), STARKE
(Starke et al., 2018), ABREU (Abreu et al., 2019), where the methods
were selected based on simplicity, efficiency, and novelty and were
chosen as the best from previous studies. However, these methods
do not deliver the best results in computing energy forecasts as
they are only validated for a single pleasant climatic area and one
NWP forecast supplier. The testing of the methods of various NWP-
based irradiance predictions suffers from the lack of consistent
generation of data of functioning PV factories together with proven
model constraints. In (Yin et al., 2020), the authors proposed to
reduce the forecasting error caused by NWP by scrutinizing the
distribution of attributes of prediction error, then using immediate
and chronological data to reduce the error. Despite a large number
of studies investigating physics-based PV forecasting, they have
multiple shortcomings: 1) they lack robustness against ambiguous
and irregular conditions; 2) they lack adjustive and self-sufficient
functionality; 3) they fail to provide reliable real-time decision
making (Wang et al., 2020b); and 4) they are unable to model
complex features and random characteristics. Consequently, the
physics-based approaches are not generally applicable for efficient
PV energy forecasting.
B. Persistent approaches
Persistence approaches are commonly used for very short-term
and short-term prediction as they have low computational burden,
short wait times, and acceptable performance. These approaches
are based on the idea that the current day is similar to the next day,
which means that the weather conditions (i.e., SI) for a 24 h ahead
is likely to stay comparable to the earlier day (Zhang et al., 2020a).
As an example, when the climate of the current day is sunny with

35 Celsius then the prediction will be performed by assuming that

the temperature of the next day is also sunny with 35 Celsius.
Consequently, it can calculate global horizontal irradiance (GHI)
4
Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037
instantaneously by disintegrating the prediction GHI material into
the calculation of sharp-sky GHI and undertaking the sharp-sky
index (Wang et al., 2020b). Nevertheless, the sharp-sky index is
unable to cope with the deviation of the solar climax gradient
owing to variations of meteorological states such as a storm, rain-
fall, and cloud within the prediction time horizon (Wang et al.,
2020c).
C. Statistical or machine learning approaches
Statistical approaches utilize the chronological sequences and
instantaneous engendered time-series. They take a small number
of input samples and demonstrate improved STPVF performance
compared with conventional NWP techniques. These ML ap-
proaches utilize genuine statistical calculations to model the rep-
resentations and interrelationships inherent in the PV time series.
Normally, the essential procedure has its own moving average
(MA), and, curvature tailoring, and auto-regressive (AR) algorithms
(Liu et al., 2012). Such algorithms reduce forecast errors by
approximating the discrepancy between the realistically quantified
historical value and the forecasts of PV production. Thus, fore-
casting performance hinges on the characteristics and components
of the received time series. As an example, the authors of (Zhou
et al., 2020) adopted the ELM for modeling input characteristics, a
genetic algorithm (GA) for optimizing the relevant parameters and
a customized similar day analysis (SDA) to forecast hourly PV power
production by estimating the similarity between various days
depending on five meteorological components. The authors of
(Theocharides et al., 2020) presented an ML framework for pre-
dicting day-ahead PV energy production by including artificial
neural networks (ANNs) to model input sequences, K-means to
cluster the weather information, and a linear regressive correction
(LRC) algorithm to optimize the generated results. In (Pan et al.,
2020), the authors employed an SVM for ultra-short-term PV po-
wer prediction and adopted ant colony optimization (ACO) for
finding the optimal SVM’s parameters. In (Moreira et al., 2021), the
authors introduced a new method for week-ahead PV generation
forecasting using an ensemble of ANNs where the design of ex-
periments (DOE) technique was employed for input factors, and
cluster analysis was conducted to select the best networks. The
authors of (Zhang et al., 2020b) introduced a hybrid framework that
integrates improved variational mode decomposition (IVMD) to
decompose PV data into normal and abnormal elements, ARIMA to
predict normal elements, and improved deep belief network (IDBN)
to forecast the abnormal elements. In (Sun et al., 2020), the authors
introduced a probabilistic framework that employs Bayesian theory
to generate weather scenarios to be passed to an ML-based multi-
model solar energy prediction approach.
Despite the wide adoption of ML approaches, they still have a
number of critical shortcomings including 1) they rely heavily on
the quality of employed feature engineering; 2) they cannot effi-
ciently deal with complex features scenarios with high irregularity;
and 3) they exhibit unstable predictive power meaning that they
are inappropriate as a component for reliable decision making
necessary for any power system. As a result, ML approaches are
often combined with other techniques to offer more precise
forecasting.
D. Deep learning approaches
Recently, DL approaches have been shown to have a competitive
forecasting performance overcoming the main limitations of con-
ventional ML approaches and alleviating the reliance on complex
feature engineering. In view of this, the authors of (Wang et al.,
2020c) investigated the potential of DL for solar power prediction
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al.
and presented a taxonomy for categorizing the present AI methods
according to their discrepancies and similarities. In (Li et al., 2020),
the authors introduced a new DL framework that integrates
wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) and LSTM networks to pre-
dict an hour-ahead PV energy using a 5-min window. In (Heidari
and Khovalyg, 2020), the authors decomposed the input time-
series and then employed LSTM augmented with attention mech-
anism (AM) to model PV power forecasts. Similarly, the authors of
(Zhang et al., 2020c) combined LSTM and Autoencoder (AE) to es-
timate uncertainties in input series, while modeling complex
weather conditions for efficient day-ahead PV energy forecasting
using a 15-min window. Further, the authors of (Dairi et al., 2020)
employed Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) for short-term PV fore-
casting owing to the ability of the VAE to model non-linear time-
series statistics in both single-step-ahead and multi-step-ahead
predictions. In the same way, IDBN has been used to model the
irregular patterns in PV energy time series (Zhang et al., 2020b). In
(Wang et al., 2020a), the authors introduced a day-ahead PV power
prediction framework using LSTM followed by a modification
technique to adjust the output LSTM network according to the time
correlation standards concerning various forms of daily PV energy.
In addition, the authors of (Huang and Wei, 2020) introduced a day-
ahead probabilistic PV energy prediction framework, where an
improved quantile CNN (QCNN) was employed for deep feature
extraction from input PV power data, then quantile regression (QR)
was adopted to produce the PV energy probability distribution
from the acquired representations. Despite the success recently
achieved by DL approaches, research in this area is still in the early
stages requiring more investigation. Thus, this study focuses on an
innovative DL model to improve the efficiency of PV energy
forecasting.
The prediction performance of a conventional statistical
approach is unsatisfactory for large-size, irregular, and high-
dimensional data. However, such approaches can perform better
by hybridizing them with other feature engineering methods.
Currently, DL approaches have emerged as data-driven approaches
to resolve the main limitations of physical, persistent, and statistical
approaches and alleviate the need for complex feature engineering
owing to their powerful feature extraction capability that enables
them to learn both regular and irregular representations from PV
energy time-series. Studies applying DL to PV energy prediction are
still in the early stages and are mostly limited to RNNs or AEs.
Therefore, this paper addresses the task of PV energy forecasting
using a new DL approach called PV-Net.
3. Methodology
This section describes and discusses the details of designing the
proposed PV-Net presented in Fig. 1, in which the conventional GRU
cell is redesigned using dilated convolutions (hence the name
Conv-GRU) to empower the network to capture spatial-temporal
representations of PV data. The residual Conv-GRU is introduced
to empower the network learning capability. The stacked Bi-Dir
modules are employed to enable the processing of information in
both forward and backward directions.
A. Data preparation
The real-world PV data captured at PV plants is at different time
intervals i.e., minutely, hourly, daily, weekly, etc., so several pre-
paratory tasks are required before using that data to train any DL
model. First, we need to select the time and size of PV energy data
required for model training and evaluating the DL model. The data
could contain abnormal samples resulted from nasty situations, so
these samples are removed from the original data as they do not
5
Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037
reflect the normal behavior of PV data. Some values could be
missing value due to system failures or similar conditions, so these
missed values are replaced with the mean value of the time win-
dow. The data features can be normalized to allow them to be
compared more usefully. Since the CNNs and LSTMs have obliga-
tions for the structure of the input data, it is essential to convert the
PV time-series into a suitable format. After the data is reformatted,
they should be split into training, validation, and test sets in the
proportions 60%, 20%, and 20% respectively. Moreover, the hyper-
parameters of the proposed PV-Net are also initialized before
model training starts.
B. Spatial-temporal Conv-GRU
Recent DL literature has demonstrated the efficiency of recur-
rent networks in modeling dependencies in sequential data.
Among them, LSTM has been widely employed due to its ability to
handle long-term dependencies without vanishing gradient.
However, energy time series usually contain positional information
and long-term correlations, which means that the LSTM is unable
to capture an important portion of input characteristics that can
significantly affect prediction performance. The authors of (Shi
et al., 2015) created a new sequence to sequence the convolu-
tional LSTM (ConvLSTM) layer by redesigning the input and state
gates using convolutional layers aiming to leverage spatial-
temporal interrelationships to provide more efficient modeling
input sequences. Nevertheless, the large amount of training pa-
rameters presented by the ConvLSTM complicates the training of
the DL model. In an attempt to tackle this issue, the authors of (Shi
et al., 2017) recently introduced the ConvGRU cell, which has been
shown to have fewer parameters compared with the ConvLSTM.
The empirical findings demonstrate that the Conv-GRU has a
powerful spatial-temporal learning capability resulting in further
performance improvement. However, the ConvLSTM and ConvGRU
have not been investigated for short-term forecasting of PV energy.
Inspired by this, we propose the redesign of the input and state
gates of conventional GRU using a dilated causal convolutions layer
(Oord et al., 2016) due to the demonstrated efficiency in modeling
time-series information. Accordingly, the spatio-temporal charac-
teristics of feature maps can be effectively captured with the
redesigned Conv-GRU, and inner computations of each gate can be
calculated with Eqs. (1)e(4).
Zt ¼ sðWxz * Xt þ Whz * ht1 Þ (1)
rt ¼ sðWxr * Xt þ Whr * ht1 Þ (2)
b
h t ¼ f ðWxh * Xt þ rt 1 ðWhh * ht1 ÞÞ (3)
ht ¼ ð1  zt Þ1 b
h t þ zt *ht1 (4)
In this paper, we use s, *, and 1 to denote a sigmoid function,
dilated casual convolution function, and Hadamard product,
correspondingly, where rt and Zt represent reset and update gates,
respectively. Given Xt representing a tensor as input, the unit first
calculates the outputs corresponding to the update gate and reset
gate by Eqs. (1) and (2), respectively. Based on the sigmoid func-
tion, the value of zt and rt lies in the interval [0,1]. Then, the hidden
temporal state h b t is calculated with Eq. (3), depending on the
current input and prior hidden state ht1 . In Eq. (4), the last hidden
state ht of the unit is computed as a linear grouping of the present
temporal hidden state h b t and the former one h . In the Conv-GRU,
t1
the forward dependencies are considered, however the overall
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037

Fig. 1. Systematic diagram indicating the pipeline of PV energy forecasting using the proposed PV-Net.

dependency information should be fully exploited; hence, it could

be advantageous to take into consideration the backward de- !)
pendencies because of the proven efficiency of leveraging both X ¼ Bi  dirðXÞ (5)
forward and backward sequential patterns in improving model
performance. As a result, in our proposed architecture, we adopted
Bi-directional (Bi-Dir) blocks that utilize two Conv-GRU layers to X Conv ¼ ConvðXÞ (6)
process the incoming feature maps in both forward and backward
directions and then deciding the upcoming output based on the
 ! 
dependencies among data in both directions. Then, the spatial-
Oi ¼ Concat X ; X Conv (7)
temporal outcome of the Bi-Dir block is computed as Yt ¼
! ! ) )
tanhðWt H * H t þ Wt H *H t Þ, in which, Y2R Fl Hl Wl , tanh denotes where O represents the output after the first residual link. The same
tangent line function, and the hidden states of both layers are calculation could be repeated according to the number of Bi-Dir
! )
blocks which is determined based on sensitivity experiments dis-
represented as H t and H t . Additionally, a dropout layer (Srivastava
et al., 2014) is applied after Conv-GRU cells to avoid overfitting cussed later.
problems during training which could limit prediction perfor- At the end of the Residual Conv-GRU module, the Batch
mance. The amount of dropout rate applied is set to 0.3, which is Normalization (BN) (Ioffe and Szegedy, 2015) layer is introduced to
empirically validated in a later section. alleviate the impact of periodicity and nonstationary nature of the
PV data on the performance of the proposed PV-Net. In other
C. Residual Conv-GRU learning words, a modest, but useful DL layer that enabled mitigating the
problem of diversity of distributions of activations, which slowed
Recently, the residual learning of CNNs has demonstrated its training of each layer due to the time is taken to adjust for new
efficiency in acquiring sophisticated discriminatory deep repre- iteration distribution, and allowed regularizing the received PV
sentations from visual data i.e., image, videos (He et al., 2016). The energy sequences, while taking into consideration the PV data
most important benefit from employing the residual connection is distribution. Given Olast as the output of the last residually con-
that it enables the development of deeper DL models (i.e., hundreds nected Bi-Dir blocks, the output of the Residual Conv-GRU module
of layers) without data leakage in deep layers while preserving the can be computed according to Eq. (8).
ease of gradient flow during training. Motivated by this strong
representational learning capability, this study proposes to inves- Y ¼ Batach  NormalizeðOlast Þ (8)
tigate the advantage of this learning technique in PV-Net to enable
effective modeling of complex and non-stationary characteristics of As shown in Fig. 1 the output of the last residual Conv-GRU
PV energy data. In particular, to fit this to the studied case, a novel module represents the forecast PV energy production for a given
residual Conv-GRU is introduced as shown in Fig. 2. Where the input. Finally, the proposed PV-Net is trained to optimize the mean
input X is passed into the first Bi-Dir block to capture the forward squared error (MSE) loss during the training process, where the
!) computation of MSE loss is articulated in Eq. (9).
and backward spatial-temporal representations X , then the
outputs of Bi-Dir blocks are concatenated with their input after
being convolved with 1  1 convolutional kernel to allow the N  2
1 X
capture of more spatial information through layers. Hence, the MSE ¼ ~i
yi  y (9)
N i¼1
pipeline of residual calculation could be formulated as shown in
Eqs. (5)e(7).
~ denote
where N represents the count of training elements, y and y
the predicted and the actual load values, respectively.
6
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al.
Fig. 2. Systematic diagram representing the architecture of the proposed Residual Conv-GRU module.
4. Experiments and analysis
A. Implementation setup
The design of all models is performed using the Keras 2.4.3 API
installed on the TensorFlow-GPU2.2.0 as the backend, and all run in
a Python 3.7 environment. All these software tools are installed on
a Dell workstation operated with a Windows 10 64-bit system and
supplemented by an Intel (R) Xeon (R) CPU E5-2670 0@ 2.60 GHz
processor, a graphical processing unit of NVIDIA Quadro K2200, and
256 GB of memory. Through all experiments, MSE is used to opti-
mize the network parameters. The Adam optimizer is adopted due
to its well-known rapid convergence and is initialized with 0.0005
as a primary learning rate, which is split by a factor of 10 following
every 200 iterations. The size of the training batch is set to be 64,
while training epochs is set to be 150. Uniform initialization is
employed to calculate the initial values of model parameters.
B. Case study
In this study, the PV data from 1B Desert Knowledge Precinct in
Central Australia (DKASC), Alice Springs PV system was chosen as a
case study. The installation configuration of the DKASC PV system is
tabulated in Table 1. According to (DKASC, 2020), the case study
samples can be easily downloaded to the workspace. The time se-
ries of 5-min resolution is captured throughout five years
(2015e2019). Fig. 3, presents a visualization of the historical PV
time-series of successive days in that period. Each part of the figure
represents the historical data of diverse years yet in an equivalent
date of the year for a period of one week, whereas the horizontal
axis denotes the timestep and the vertical axis denote the relative
Table 1
The specification of the power system of DKASC, Alice Springs (1B group).
Array tilt/Azimuth Variable : Dual axis tracking:
Installation completed Thu; 8 Jan 2009
Inverter size/type 4 x 6 kW; SMA SMC 6000A
Type of tracker DEGERenergie 5000NT; dual axis
Array area 4 x 38:37 m2
Panel type Trina TSM  195DC01A
Number of panels 4 x 30
Panel rating 195W
Array rating 23:4kW
7
Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037
active power.
It could be noted from any sub-figures that the energy during
the noontime is the highest, which is comparatively minor at
sunrise and in the mid-afternoon, having a tendency to be zero at
nightfall. PV energy between contiguous timesteps is influenced by
a variety of aspects and differs significantly without powerful
consistency. Based on the observations of different sub-figures, the
energy discrepancy between the equal times periods in different
years is also considerable and it is difficult to discover the regime
because of the variability in the physical environment, which in
turn introduces high ambiguity. Fig. 4 shows the map of solar po-
wer installations in Alice Springs, Central Australia, which are
distributed over 38 locations, among them one location (i.e., 1) is
separated into 1A and 1B groupings. The PV energy time-series
employed here came from sector 1B. The detailed material and
specifications of all solar power systems are publicly available.
The experimental data primarily involves wind direction (A ^  Þ;
diffuse horizontal radiation (w=m2  sr), global horizontal radia-
tion ((w=m2  sr), weather relative humidity (%), weather tem-
perature Celsius ( C), wind speed (m=s), active power (kW), current
phase average (A), etc. The data get prepared before fed into the
model by eliminating abnormal samples and substituting the
missed elements, while the samples for each attribute is normal-
ized to be scaled into the equal dimension, while a simple
augmentation technique is applied to expand the size of data (for
example, the sine value and cosine value are employed to augment
wind direction). The data is divided into two parts: 80% for training
and 20% for testing. The training set is divided in the same way with
80% for training and 20% for validation.
C. Evaluation metrics
This subsection presents the evaluation measures employed to
assess the predictive efficiency of the proposed PV-Net:
 Mean Absolute Error (MAE): The MAE denotes the mean sig-
nificance of the forecasting errors and is computed as the
average of the absolute divergence between forecast and real
values, as shown in Eq. (10).
N  
1 X y i  y


MAE ¼ ~ (10)
N i¼1  i 
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037

Fig. 3. Visualization of one-week samples of our case study using 5 min resolution a) 2015 samples; b) 2016 samples; c) 2017 samples; d) 2018 samples; e) 2019 samples.

Fig. 4. Visualization of the map of DKASC power system (DKASC, 2020).

8
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037

 Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE): The MAPE evaluates outperforming all the competing data-driven approaches which
the mean absolute percentage of the forecasting performance of illustrates the ability of the proposed model to model seasonal/
the model as expressed in Eq. (11). periodical information in complex non-linear relationships and
irregular patterns within the received PV power data.
 
  For a comprehensive understanding of the model’s behavior,
N  
1 X  i
y  ~
y i Fig. 5 presents a comparison of the forecasting errors of PV-Net
MAPE ¼    100% (11)
N i¼1  yi  with other competing approaches using distinct intervals of input
 
sequences. It is observable that employing a PV time-series data
with an interval of half-year results in the worst forecasting per-
formance, mostly because the short length input did not promote
 Mean Square Error (MSE): The MSE measure represents the
effective training of any of the implemented DL approaches,
average squared variation between the expected and the real
resulting in greater forecasting error greater. Once the range of
values, as formulated in Eq. (9).
input sequence is increased to a length of one year, the performance
 Root Mean Square Error (RMSE): The RMSE metric represents
of the model increases and PV-Net realizes the best performance
the standard deviation corresponding to forecasting errors and
(MAE: 0.786; MPAE: 10.86%; RMSE: 0.976). Compared with GRU,
is a frequently applied measure in prediction/regression analysis
the values of RMSE, MAE, and MAPE of PV-Net were enhanced by
and is calculated with Eq. (12).
0.611, 0.087, and 3.4% correspondingly. Compared with CLSTM, the
vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi PV-Net results of RMSE, MAE, and MAPE were enhanced by 0.465,
u N  2
u1 X 0.035, and 2.1%, in that order. This is primarily because increasing
RMSE ¼ t yi  y ~i (12) the length of the input interval allows the recurrent networks to
N i¼1
progressively learn the temporal characteristics from input se-
quences, whereas the spatial information becomes comparatively
poorer. Hence, CNN is unable to effectively model important data
D. Results and comparisons
representations, and the LSTM/GRU performs better. PV-net has the
best performance because it can effectively capture both kinds of
This sub-section presents the results achieved by experimenting
information even in the case of short sequences.
with the proposed PV-Net on the test set of our case study as shown
It can be seen that increasing the length of input interval to 3
in the last row of Table 2. At the same time, we compare these
years, the prediction error decreases for most competing methods.
results with the corresponding ones achieved by recent state-of-
In particular, CNN achieved the highest RMSE of 1.563, while PV-
the-art approaches implemented under the same settings as pre-
Net achieved the lowest RMSE of 1.034 with 0.179 reductions in
sented in Table 2.
forecasting error. For MAE, the worst performance of 0.799 is
It can be noted that the CNN (Wang et al., 2019) had the highest
realized by LSTM while the best performance of 0.583 is achieved
forecasting error (MAE: 0.6528; MAPE: 8.98%; MSE: 1.1389; RMSE:
by PV-Net. For MAPE, the highest error of 9.51% is achieved by CNN
1.2971) which can be explained by the nature of convolution layers
while the best performance of 0.0873 is achieved by PV-Net. The
failing to capture the temporal representations inherent in the
CLSTM and LSTM þ AM keep performing better than the LSTM and
historical PV time series. It is also observable that the LSTM archi-
CNN. However, in contrast with CLSTM, the RMSE, MAE of PV-Net
tecture presented in (Sharadga et al., 2020) has better forecasting
rose by 0.2, and 0.069, correspondingly. Compared with CLSTM,
performance (MAE: 0.6437; MPAE: 8.32; MSE: 1.0637; RMSE:
the RMSE, MAE of PV-Net rose by 0.313, and 0.181, correspondingly.
1.1314) in comparison with the CNN (Heidari and Khovalyg, 2020).
This can be justified by the fact that the CLSTM architecture in-
This indicates the prominence of modeling the seasonal and peri-
cludes LSTM to model temporal representations, while the CNN
odical information on improving the prediction performance.
layers are introduced to capture the hidden positional representa-
Additionally, integrating the LSTM and CNN in (Wang et al., 2019)
tions of data. Thus, the forecasting performance of CLSTM is much
shows great improvement in forecasting performance across
better than that of the approaches that depend only on CNN or
different measures (MAE: 0.4215; MPAE: 7.53; MSE: 0.9538; RMSE:
LSTM.
0.9097) which explains the effectiveness of modeling both posi-
Although the competing approaches perform the worst in our
tional and historical representations in PV energy data. In the same
comparative experiments, previous studies show that their fore-
way, combining LSTM and AM in (Heidari and Khovalyg, 2020) has
casting performance is better than conventional ML approaches, so
demonstrated similar performance improvement ((MAE: 0.4824;
we did not consider comparing PV-Net with conventional ap-
MAPE: 7.10%; MSE: 0.9763; RMSE: 0.9531) as it enables the model
proaches. Nevertheless, it is notable in Fig. 5 that forecasting per-
to attend more to the most crucial features throughout the learning.
formance does not always improve with the increase of the length
Moreover, the adoption of the GRU in (Lee and Kim, 2020) shows
of input intervals and degrades in some cases. This could be
robust forecasting performance over the CNN and LSTM architec-
explained by the characteristics of the PV energy data itself. In
tures (MAE: 0.4617; MAPE: 7.31; MSE: 0.9807, RMSE: 0.9617). More
terms of time series, it does not necessarily follow that more data
outstandingly, the proposed PV-Net has the lowest prediction error
will result in better prediction. When the data increases to a
(MAE: 0.3987; MAPE: 6.61%; MSE: 0.9013; RMSE: 0.8124)

Table 2
A comparative analysis of day-ahead forecasting for different competing methods on our test set using different evaluation measures.

Methods MAE MAPE (%) MSE RMSE

CNN (Wang et al., 2019) 0.6531 8.988 1.1389 1.2971

LSTM (Sharadga et al., 2020) 0.6373 8.321 1.0637 1.1314
CLSTM (Wang et al., 2019) 0.4215 7.532 0.9538 0.9097
LSTM þ AM (Heidari and Khovalyg, 2020) 0.4824 7.106 0.9763 0.9531
GRU (Lee and Kim, 2020) 0.4617 7.312 0.9807 0.9617
*PV-Net 0.3987 6.614 0.9013 0.8124

9
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037

Fig. 5. Evaluating the impact of using different input intervals on the forecasting errors of competing models a) the models’ RMSE error for different ranges of input sequence. B)
models’ error for different ranges of input sequence.; c) models’ MAPE error for different ranges of input sequence.

particular degree, the input information is further from the pre-
dicted outcome, and consequently becomes less correlated with
the models’ prediction; thus, increasing the data might decrease
forecasting performance. To analyze the performance of the pro-
posed PV-Net more intuitively, we present the RMSE, MAE, and
MAPE of competing approaches using different input intervals as
depicted in Fig. 5 (a)e(c).
Motivated by the fact that PV energy is greatly affected by sea-
sonal factors, this study comparatively evaluates the performance
of the proposed PV-Net against other competing approaches on
seasonal test data. The original test set is partitioned into four sub-
groups related to the four seasons in Australia, specifically autumn
(Mar.eMay), summer (Dec.eFeb.), spring (Sept.eNov.), and winter
(Jun.eAug.). For every season, Fig. 6 shows the forecasting errors of
competing methods in term of RMSE, MAE, and MAPE. It is
observable that the proposed PV-Net surpasses the competing
approaches for short-term PV energy prediction in all seasons,
attaining the lowest RMSE of 0.798 in the autumn and the highest
RMSE of 0.829 in the summer as shown in Fig. 6 (a). PV-Net ach-
ieves the lowest MAE of 0.391 in the spring and the highest MAE of
0.408 in the autumn, as shown in Fig. 6 (b). PV-Net achieves the
lowest MAPE of 0.056 in the spring and the highest MAPE of 0.074
in the winter, as shown in Fig. 6 (c). This further confirms the su-
periority of the proposed PV-Net for seasonal changes compared
with the competing approaches.

10
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al.
Fig. 6. The results of experimenting the competing methods on different seasonal data a) the RMSE results; b) the MAE results; c) the MAPE results.
E. Ablation experiments
The main objective of this sub-section is to comprehensively
inspect and evaluate the effect and the contribution of different
components on the final hour-ahead load forecasting. In these ex-
periments, we chose LSTM (Abreu et al., 2019) as a robust baseline
architecture for the proposed PV-Net.
1) Impact of Conv-GRU
11
Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037
In order to validate the effectiveness of the redesigned Conv-
GRU, we implement the proposed PV-Net using different variants
of recurrent cells and report the corresponding RMSE results in
Fig. 7. It could be seen that implementing the PV-Net using the
SimpleRNN shows the highest prediction error (RMSE: 0.8531). The
LSTM and GRU cells improve the performance of PV-Net with
0.0262 and 0.0216, respectively. Compared with LSTM, employing
the ConvLSTM cells in PV-Net improves the performance by 0.0318.
More importantly, the proposed Conv-GRU cells shows great
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al.
Fig. 7. The ablation experiments for analyzing the impact of Conv-GRU.
performance improvements outperforming other conventional
cells with 0.8124 RMSE which in turn validates the effectiveness of
Conv-GRU in modeling the spatial-temporal information inherent
in the PV energy data.
2) Impact of residual linking
For experimenting with the efficacy of the introduced residual
link, variants of PV-Net were designed by implementing the re-
sidual Conv-GRU module using no residual link, convolutional re-
sidual connection (He et al., 2016), average-pooling connection,
max-pooling connection, and the corresponding RMSE results in
Fig. 8. It is notable that implementing the PV-Net using the no re-
sidual link shows the highest prediction error (RMSE: 0.9071).
Designing the residual link using the average-pooling or max-
pooling layer improves the performance of PV-Net with 0.0359
and 0.0498, respectively. The adoption convolutional residual
connection reduces the prediction error to 0.8473. More notably,
the proposed residual learning shows great performance im-
provements outperforming other residual techniques with RMSE of
0.8124 This demonstrates that the designing residual link using
convolutional empowers the network capability to model posi-
tional information of input PV sequence and avoids information
loss between layers and alleviating the vanishing gradient problem.
3) Impact of BN layer
To examine the efficiency of employing the BN layers, we
compare two variants of PV-Net with and without the BN layer.
Fig. 9 shows that applying the BN layer improves the prediction
Fig. 8. The ablation experiments for analyzing the impact of Residual learning.
12
Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037
Fig. 9. The ablation experiments for analyzing the impact of BN layer.
performance with 0.0365, 0.0226, and 0.0151 on RMSE, MAE, MAPE
in that order. This explains the influence of the BN layer in reducing
the negative impact of the nonstationary nature of the data.
4) Impact of Bi-directional layers
To evaluate the importance of the Bi-Dir block in the design of
PV-Net, an additional experiment was performed to evaluate the
performance of PV-Net when the Conv-GRU is designed in a uni-
directional or bi-directional fashion and the resultant values are
presented in Fig. 10. It is notable that adopting bidirectional
learning reduces the forecasting error with 0.1107, 0.054, and
0.0231 on RMSE, MAE, and MAPE respectively. This explains the
role of considering backward information during the learning
process.
5) Impact of dropout
The dropout layer is often employed to avoid overfitting issues,
hence determining an appropriate dropout rate necessitate exper-
imenting with the PV-Net with different rates as depicted in Fig. 11,
which shows that PV-Net achieves the best RMSE with the dropout
rate of 0.5 and achieves the optimal MAE when the dropout rate is
0.3. The lowest MAPE is attained when the 0.5 dropouts are
employed.
F. Sensitivity analysis
Given that the Residual Conv-GRU modules are stacked to
Fig. 10. The ablation experiments for analyzing the impact of bidirectional learning.
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 303 (2021) 127037

Fig. 11. The ablation experiments for analyzing the impact of dropout rates.

capture the spatial and temporal characteristics of input sequences, Table 3

sensitivity analysis experiments were executed on the test set to The P-values calculated using the paired t-test on the test set of the two datasets
using MAE, AEP, and RMSE.
investigate the effect of the number of layers/modules on the
forecasting performance. Fig. 12 shows that the best performance Methods Test set (20%)
(MAE:39.49%, RMSE:81.03%) is realized when the number of layers MAE MAPE RMSE
of PV-Net is three, and when the number of residual Conv-GRU
PV-Net vs CNN 0.01214 0.01003 0.01081
modules per layer is set to be five according to a hyperparameter PV-Net vs LSTM 0.01131 0.01023 0.01234
grid search. This behavior explains that when an abundant number PV-Net vs CLSTM 0.01513 0.00978 0.01087
of modules is reached, the variation in prediction performance is PV-Net vs LSTM þ AM 0.01411 0.00979 0.01687
smaller. Therefore, the proposed PV-Net achieves the best perfor- PV-Net vs GRU 0.00989 0.01034 0.01576

mance based on those selected parameters.

G. Statistical analysis
To further demonstrate the robustness of the results achieved by
the proposed PV-Net, the statistical t-test experiment (Virtanen
et al., 2020) is performed to validate the statistical significance of
the PV-Net compared with the competing data-driven approaches.
In each experiment, three metrices of MAE, MAPE, and RMSE are
estimated, where the significance threshold of a ¼ 0.05. Where a p-
value less than 0.05 indicates statistical significance, and a p-value
larger than 0.05 indicates no statistical significance. Table 3 shows
the attained P-values from these t-test experiments for our case
study. PV-Net realizes the greatest p-values of 0.03114, 0.02916, and
0.03746 on the MAE, MAPE, and RMSE, respectively. Meanwhile,
the PV-Net had maximum p-values of 0.01513, 0.01034, and
0.01576 on the MAE, MAPE, and RMSE, respectively. It is observable
that all these tabulated p-values are less than 0.0.5, demonstrating
that PV-Net is considerably distinctive from the competing DL
approaches.
5. Limitations
This section introduces the primary limitations of this study that
need to be considered in future work. First, the study did not
consider cloud thickness and cloud motion information that might
have a great effect on forecasting performance. Second, the study
formulated the task of PV energy forecasting as a black-box
approach such that the mathematical correlation between the
input parameters and PV energy production is not completely
disclosed. Thus, it is not obvious which input element is the most
important factor influencing the forecasting performance. Third,
the complexity of PV power stems from the combination of the
physical model of the battery, meteorological conditions, and
environmental elements into an efficient forecasting model. Fourth,
the proposed PV-Net was evaluated for single-step, short-term
forecastingdlonger-term and multi-step scenarios were not
considered.

6. Conclusions and future works

This paper introduces a new data-driven DL framework, called

PV-Net, to forecast short-term PV energy production. The main
target was to alleviate the demand for robust feature engineering to
generate efficient PV power forecasts. In the proposed PV-Net, the
gates of GRU are redesigned using convolutional layers to promote
improved feature extraction and fine-tuned periodical represen-
tations of PV data. The redesigned Conv-GRU cell is integrated into
residually connected bidirectional blocks to improve the network
capabilities in modeling the irregular characteristics inherent in the
received PV time series. Technical and statistical evaluation of a
public use-case demonstrates the superiority of the new PV-Net
Fig. 12. Sensitivity experiments to determine the optimal number of layers in the PV- compared with the latest cutting-edge data-driven techniques.
Net. Further, PV-Net maintains high-level proficiency even with the
13
M. Abdel-Basset, H. Hawash, R.K. Chakrabortty et al.
inclusion of complex non-regular features and affecting factors.
Consequently, the proposed PV-Net could be adopted as a reliable
framework of PV energy forecasting in a power management
system.
In our plans for future work, we aim to investigate the potential
of PV-Net for mid-term and long-term forecasting with more
complex features and noisy data such as highly randomized infor-
mation about cloud thickness and movement. Additionally,
inspired by recent improvements in internet of things (IoT) tech-
nologies, we intend to investigate PV energy forecasting in a
complicated IoT enabled power systems. The interpretability of the
proposed PV-Net will be investigated for different categories of
renewable energy sources (i.e., wind power) to enable clarifying
which input is more influential for prediction performance.
Furthermore, the probabilistic forecasting of PV energy has not
been fully investigated in the literature, which might help esti-
mating the ambiguity data, hence cope with potential uncertain
operating circumstances.
Funding
This research has no funding source.
Ethical approval
This article does not contain any studies with human partici-
pants or animals performed by any of the authors.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Mohamed Abdel-Basset: Investigation, Methodology, Re-
sources, Visualization, Software, Writing - original draft, Writing -
review & editing. Hossam Hawash: Investigation, Methodology,
Resources, Visualization, Software, Writing - original draft, Writing
- review & editing. Ripon K. Chakrabortty: Conceptualization,
Methodology, Writing - review & editing. Michael Ryan: Investi-
gation, Validation, Supervision, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing in-
terests or personal relationships that could have appeared to in-
fluence the work reported in this paper.
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