The paper presents an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model for short-term load forecasting of daily peak load. A multi-layered feed forward neural network with Levenberg-Marquardt learning algorithm is used because of its good generalizing property and robustness in prediction. The input to the network is in terms of historical daily peak load data and corresponding daily peak temperature data. The network is trained to predict the load requirement ahead. The effectiveness of the proposed ANN approach to the short-term load forecasting problems is demonstrated by practical data from the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company Limited (BESCOM). The comparison between the proposed and the conventional methods is made in terms of percentage error and it is found that the proposed ANN model gives more accurate predictions with optimal number of neurons in the hidden layer
