A new deep learning architecture with inductive bias balance for transformer oil temperature forecasting

Abstract

Ensuring the optimal performance of power transformers is a laborious task in which the insulation system plays a vital role in decreasing their deterioration. The insulation system uses insulating oil to control temperature, as high temperatures can reduce the lifetime of the transformers and lead to expensive maintenance. Deep learning architectures have been demonstrated remarkable results in various fields. However, this improvement often comes at the cost of increased computing resources, which, in turn, increases the carbon footprint and hinders the optimization of architectures. In this study, we introduce a novel deep learning architecture that achieves a comparable efficacy to the best existing architectures in transformer oil temperature forecasting while improving efficiency. Effective forecasting can help prevent high temperatures and monitor the future condition of power transformers, thereby reducing unnecessary waste. To balance the inductive bias in our architecture, we propose the Smooth Residual Block, which divides the original problem into multiple subproblems to obtain different representations of the time series, collaboratively achieving the final forecasting. We applied our architecture to the Electricity Transformer datasets, which obtain transformer insulating oil temperature measures from two transformers in China. The results showed a 13% improvement in MSE and a 57% improvement in performance compared to the best current architectures, to the best of our knowledge. Moreover, we analyzed the architecture behavior to gain an intuitive understanding of the achieved solution.