Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Prediction Based on a Digital Twin Model

Abstract

Due to the influence of meteorological conditions, shipboard photovoltaic (PV) systems have problems such as large fluctuation and inaccurate prediction of the output power. In this paper, a short-term PV power prediction method based on a novel digital twin (DT) model and BiLSTM is proposed. Firstly, a PV mechanism model and a data-driven model were established, in which the data-driven model was updated iteratively in real time using the sliding time window update method; then, these two models were converged to construct a PV DT model according to the DS evidence theory. Secondly, a BiLSTM model was built to make short-term predictions of the PV power using the augmented dataset of the DT model as an input. Finally, the method was tested and verified by experiments and further compared with main PV prediction methods. The research results indicate the following: firstly, the absolute error of the DT model was smaller than that of the mechanism model and the data-driven model, being as low as 5.62 W after the data update of the data-driven model; thus, the DT model realized data augmentation and high fidelity. Secondly, compared to several main PV prediction models, the PV DT model combined with BiLSTM had the lowest RMSE, MAE, and MAPE; the best followability; and the smallest absolute error under different weather conditions, which was especially obvious under cloudy weather conditions. In summary, the method can accurately predict the shipboard PV power, which has great theoretical significance and application value for improving the economy and reliability of solar ship operation.