Published May 11, 2026 | Version 1.0
Working paper Open

Probabilistic Forecasting of Cogenerated District Heating in Finland Under Structural Fleet Transition: A Temporal Fusion Transformer Approach

  • 1. Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Helsinki, Finland

Description

District heating systems in Finland are undergoing structural transition as combined heat and power (CHP) plants are decommissioned, creating non-stationary forecasting conditions that challenge conventional models. This paper presents a probabilistic forecasting pipeline for national Finnish CHP-based district heating using a Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) trained on nine years of hourly Fingrid open data. A residual-from-persistence target reformulation is introduced to handle non-stationarity under structural regime shift, significantly improving forecast accuracy. The proposed TFT-resid model achieves a mean absolute error of 87.4 MWh/h and a sMAPE of 21.2%, outperforming XGBoost baselines and naive persistence benchmarks. This work forms the research foundation of the ET-Design Lab (Aurinkolab Community), where the forecasting methodology is applied in the construction of an AI-driven Uusimaa Heating Digital Twin — a real student-built tool at the intersection of cutting-edge energy research and hands-on engineering education for teenagers.

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Additional details

Funding

European Commission
ENPOWER - Energy Activated Citizens and Data-Driven Energy-Secure Communities for a Consumer-Centric Energy System 101096354

Dates

Available
2026-05-11
First preprint release

Software

Repository URL
https://github.com/mariaro833/finnish-dh-forecasting
Programming language
Python
Development Status
Active