International Journal of Power Electronics and Drive Systems (IJPEDS)
Vol 17, No 3: September 2026

TCM-Former: a transformer with temporal convolution for photovoltaic power forecasting

Sarab Al-Chlaihawi (Al-Furat Al-Awsat Technical University)
Mohammed A. T. Alrubei (Al-Furat Al-Awsat Technical University)
Faris A. Alhaddad (Al-Furat Al-Awsat Technical University)



Article Info

Publish Date
01 Sep 2026

Abstract

To tackle the problem of modeling long-term trends and short-term and high-frequency variations in PV time series, a strong and efficient forecasting model of photovoltaic (PV) power generation is advanced. This paper presents STL-TCM-Former, a hybrid model that breaks down the raw PV signal with seasonal-trend decomposition with LOESS (STL) into trend and seasonal components. These elements are after that processed via a dual path encoder decoder transformer architecture that is improved with a temporal convolutional module (TCM). The period (transformer-based) path is used for capturing the global, long-range dependencies in seasonal component and temporal (TCM) path is used to extract the localized, short-term dynamics. Trend component is processed with a dedicated TCM branch, minimizing component interferences and providing a multiscale temporal representation, specific to PV generation patterns. The proposed model was evaluated on the Yulara (Uluru) solar dataset under short-term (60-hour) and long-term (300-hour) forecasting horizons. Compared with benchmark models including LSTM, WOA-LSTM, VMD-LSTM, WOA-VMD-LSTM, and hybrid WOA/VMD/LSTM configurations, STL-TCM-former achieved superior performance with R² = 99.76%, MAPE ≈ 2.24%, RMSE = 16.63, and MAE = 10.36. In addition, the PJM interconnection dataset was also employed to evaluate the generalization capability of the proposed method. The results demonstrate high accuracy, stability, and strong generalization capability under varying environmental conditions.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

IJPEDS

Publisher

Subject

Control & Systems Engineering Electrical & Electronics Engineering

Description

International Journal of Power Electronics and Drive Systems (IJPEDS, ISSN: 2088-8694, a SCOPUS indexed Journal) is the official publication of the Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science (IAES). The scope of the journal includes all issues in the field of Power Electronics and drive systems. ...