Forecasting Hourly Demand of City Gas in Korea

This study examined the characteristics of the hourly demand of city gas in Korea and proposed multiple regression models to obtain precise estimates of the hourly demand of city gas. Forecasting the hourly demand of city gas with accuracy is essential in terms of safety and cost. If underestimated, the pipeline pressure needs to be increased sharply to meet the demand, when safety matters. In the opposite case, unnecessary inventory and operation costs are incurred. Data analysis showed that the hourly demand of city gas has a very high autocorrelation and that the 24-hour demand pattern of a day follows the previous 24-hour demand pattern of the same day. That is, there is a weekly cycle pattern. In addition, some conditions that temperature affects the hourly demand level were found. That is, the absolute value of the correlation coefficient between the hourly demand and temperature is about 0.853 on average, while the absolute value of the correlation coefficient on a specific day improves to 0.861 at worst and 0.965 at best. Based on this analysis, this paper proposes a multiple regression model incorporating the hourly demand ahead of 24 hours and the hourly demand ahead of 168 hours, and another multiple regression model with temperature as an additional independent variable. To show the performance of the proposed models, computational experiments were carried out using real data of the domestic city gas demand from 2009 to 2013. The test results showed that the first regression model exhibits a forecasting accuracy of MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error) around 4.5% over the past five years from 2009 to 2013, while the second regression model exhibits 5.13% of MAPE for the same period.