Smart Energy Management: A Comparative Study of Energy Consumption Forecasting Algorithms for an Experimental Open-Pit Mine

The mining industry’s increased energy consumption has resulted in a slew of climate-related effects on the environment, many of which have direct implications for humanity’s survival. The forecast of mine site energy use is one of the low-cost approaches for energy conservation. Accurate predictions do indeed assist us in better understanding the source of high energy consumption and aid in making early decisions by setting expectations. Machine Learning (ML) methods are known to be the best approach for achieving desired results in prediction tasks in this area. As a result, machine learning has been used in several research involving energy predictions in operational and residential buildings. Only few research, however, has investigated the feasibility of machine learning algorithms for predicting energy use in open-pit mines. To close this gap, this work provides an application of machine learning algorithms in the RapidMiner tool for predicting energy consumption time series using real-time data obtained from a smart grid placed in an experimental open-pit mine. This study compares the performance of four machine learning (ML) algorithms for predicting daily energy consumption: Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), and Random Forest (RF). The models were trained, tested, and then evaluated. In order to assess the models’ performance four metrics were used in this study, namely correlation (R), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), and root relative squared error (RRSE). The performance of the models reveals RF to be the most effective predictive model for energy forecasting in similar cases.