We consider the problem of short-term electricity demand forecasting in a small-scale area. Electric power usage depends heavily on irregular daily events. Event information must be incorporated into the forecasting model to obtain high forecast accuracy. The electricity fluctuation due to daily events is considered to be a basis function of time period in a regression model. We present several basis functions that extract the characteristics of the event effect. When the basis function cannot be specified, we employ the fused lasso for automatic construction of the basis function. With the fused lasso, some coefficients of neighboring time periods take exactly the same values, leading to stable basis function estimation and enhancement of interpretation. Our proposed method is applied to the electricity demand data of a research facility in Japan. The results show that our proposed model yields better forecast accuracy than a model that omits event information; our proposed method resulted in roughly 12% and 20% improvements in mean absolute percentage error and root mean squared error, respectively.

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The linear stability of a thermal reaction front has been investigated based on the thermal-diffusive model proposed by Zel’dovich and Frank-Kamenetskii, which is called ZFK model. In the framework of ZFK model, heat-conduction and mass-diffusion equations are treated without the effect of hydrodynamic flow. Then, two types of instability appear: cellular and oscillatory instabilities. The cellular instability has only positive real part of growth rate, while the oscillatory instability is accompanied with non-zero imaginary part. In this study, the effect of heat release and viscosity on both instabilities is investigated asymptotically and numerically. This is achieved by coupling mass-conservation and Navier–Stokes equations with the ZFK model for small heat release. Then, the stable range of Lewis number, where the real part of growth rate is negative, is widened by non-zero values of heat release for any wavenumber. The increase of Prandtl number also brings the stabilization effect on the oscillatory instability. However, as for the cellular instability, the viscosity leads to the destabilization effect for small wavenumbers, opposed to its stabilization effect for moderate values of wavenumber. Under the limit of small wavenumber, the property of viscosity becomes clear in view of cut-off wavenumber, which makes the real part of growth rate zero.

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