A physics-constrained temporal modeling framework for robust short-term wind power forecasting

Abstract

Accurate short-term wind power prediction plays a critical role in ensuring stable grid operation, effective energy management, and the large-scale integration of renewable energy systems under highly variable wind conditions. Although data-driven and deep learning models have demonstrated promising forecasting capability, many existing approaches suffer from performance degradation during rapid wind fluctuations due to the lack of embedded physical constraints and the high computational complexity associated with recurrent architectures. To address these limitations, this article proposes a Physics-Guided Residual Temporal Convolutional Network (PG-ResTCN) for short-term wind power forecasting. The proposed framework integrates dilated temporal convolutional learning with residual connections to effectively capture multiscale temporal dependencies in wind power time series while avoiding the sequential computation of recurrent neural networks, thereby improving computational efficiency. Furthermore, a physics-based smoothness constraint is incorporated into the training loss function to enforce physically consistent power ramping behavior that reflects the inherent operational dynamics and inertia of wind turbines, reducing unrealistic fluctuations in predicted power outputs. The effectiveness of the proposed model is validated using a large real-world dataset containing approximately 140,161 hourly samples collected from five wind farm locations, including meteorological variables and corresponding turbine power outputs. Comprehensive experiments are conducted by comparing the proposed method with widely used benchmark models, including Support Vector Regression, Random Forest, Extreme Gradient Boosting, and Long Short-Term Memory networks. Results demonstrate that the proposed PG-ResTCN model achieves superior forecasting performance, obtaining a root mean square error of 0.0359, mean absolute error of 0.0296, and R 2 of 0.9759, outperforming all baseline models. The integration of physics-guided constraints with the temporal convolutional architecture significantly enhances prediction accuracy, stability, and generalization capability. In addition, the proposed framework maintains high computational efficiency and robustness, making it suitable for real-time wind energy forecasting applications, intelligent energy management systems, and microgrid power system operations.