Sailing Towards Efficiency: A Variational Mode Decomposition Based Approach to Forecasting Shipboard Electrical Power Consumption

This paper presents a Variational Mode Decomposition based (VMD) approach for multi-step prediction of univariate electrical load on large passenger ships. Specifically, VMD is adopted as a pre-processing step to enhance the performance of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based forecasting models. It is demonstrated that decomposing the signal into intrinsic mode functions via VMD before forecasting significantly outperforms (up to a 66% error reduction) the conventional approach of feeding the entire signal into the forecasting model. The resulting findings suggest that the integration of VMD into the forecasting pipeline could yield a useful tool for a more accurate and efficient power management on large passenger ships.