Day-ahead industrial load forecasting for electric RTG cranes

Given the increase in international trading and the signficant energy and environmental challenges in ports around the world, there is a need for a greater
understanding of the energy demand behaviour at ports. The move towards electrified rubber-tyred gantry (RTG) cranes is expected to reduce gas emissions and increase energy savings compared to diesel RTG cranes but it will increase electrical energy demand. Electrical load forecasting is a key tool for understanding the energy demand which is usually applied to data with strong
regularities and seasonal patterns. However, the highly volatile and stochastic behaviour of the RTG crane demand creates a substantial prediction challenge. This paper is one of the first extensive investigations into short term load forecasts for electrified RTG crane demand. Options for model inputs are investigated depending on extensive data and correlation analysis. The
effect of estimation accuracy of exogenous variables on the forecast accuracy is investigated as well. The models are tested on two different RTG crane data sets that were collected from the Port of Felixstowe in the UK.