TY - JOUR
T1 - Advancements in Solar Radiation Prediction: GAN-Solar Model for High-Precision Forecasting in Photovoltaic Systems
AU - Reem Al-Harbi
AU - Omar Al-Qahtani
AU - Salma Nasser
JF - Journal of Smart Grids, Energy Analytics and Optimization
JO - J Smart Grids Energy Anal Optim
Y1 - 2023
VL - 2
IS - 2
SP - 59
N2 - Reliable short-term forecasting of solar radiation is crucial to ensuring the smooth operation and optimal scheduling of photovoltaic (PV) power systems. At present, cutting-edge encoder–decoder frameworks that leverage satellite remote sensing imagery are the dominant strategy for accomplishing this task. Yet these approaches reveal clear weaknesses, particularly when using longer prediction windows. Under extended horizons, the resulting maps commonly display blurred spatial patterns and noticeable inaccuracies in radiation levels. Such flaws substantially undermine forecast sharpness and trustworthiness, rendering them inadequate for applications requiring very high accuracy. To address these shortcomings, we introduce GAN-Solar — a novel post-processing architecture for improving short-term solar radiation predictions that leverages Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The framework adopts a conditional ED-AttUNet as its generator. A carefully designed discriminator equipped with residual blocks, stepwise resolution reduction, and auxiliary conditional signals is trained to separate genuine from synthetic radiation fields. Through this competitive training — steered by a composite loss and a discriminator acting as an adaptive quality metric — the model progressively sharpens prediction fidelity. Evaluations of real summer solar radiation datasets show that GAN-Solar delivers substantial gains in output quality. Compared with the plain ED-AttUNet baseline, it reduces the Root Mean Square Error by about 3.2% and increases the Structural Similarity Index from 0.84 to 0.87. Overall, the method effectively corrects for texture smearing and intensity warping, yielding noticeably crisper, more faithful solar radiation maps.
UR - https://isespub.com/y507675370
ER -