Continuous conditional random field model for predicting the electrical load of a combined cycle power plant

Abstract

Existing power plants may consume significant amounts of fuel and require high operating costs, partly because of poor electrical power output estimates. This paper suggests a continuous conditional random field (C-CRF) model to predict more precisely the full-load electrical power output of a base load operated combined cycle power plant. We introduce three feature functions to model association potential and one feature function to model interaction potential. Together, these functions compose the C-CRF model, and the model is transformed into a multivariate Gaussian distribution with which the operation parameters can be modeled more efficiently. The performance of our model in estimating power output was evaluated by means of a real dataset and our model outperformed existing methods. Moreover, our model can be used to estimate confidence intervals of the predicted output and calculate several probabilities.