A deep learning based communication traffic prediction approach for smart monitoring of distributed energy resources in virtual power plants

Virtual power plants (VPPs) have been widely recognized as a key enabler for energy system neutrality. The communication traffic of a VPP fundamentally indicates its activeness in interacting with the power system, thus providing a new dimension in depicting the behaviour characteristics of distributed energy resources in VPPs. Therefore, the prediction of communication traffic is significant in improving the control efficiency of VPPs. However, due to the involvement of numerous interactive agents characterised by both individual randomness and coordinative characteristics, traditional prediction models are no longer capable of fitting VPP communication traffic effectively. Therefore, a  novel prediction model is introduced that enhances the prediction accuracy by integrating long short-term memory (LSTM) and variational mode decomposition (VMD). This model employs VMD as the initial step for extracting the intrinsic modes from the traffic sequence, thereby mitigating the impact of incidental noise. Then, LSTM is applied to fit each intrinsic mode individually. Additionally, considering the outer influencing factors, the attention mechanism is incorporated. Finally, all sub-prediction algorithms are neatly integrated as a whole prediction model. The proposed model is evaluated through simulation prediction using realistic VPP communication traffic data, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness.