Energy-Arena: A Dynamic Benchmark for Operational Energy Forecasting

2026-04-27

AI Summary

Existing energy forecasting research suffers from inconsistent datasets, time horizons, and evaluation protocols, hindering fair comparison and progress assessment. This work proposes Energy-Arena.org—a dynamic, open, forward-looking benchmarking platform that introduces a novel rolling-window mechanism, mandating prospective submission followed by retrospective evaluation to effectively prevent data leakage and post-hoc tuning. The platform enforces standardized API-based submission interfaces, unified scoring protocols, and a persistent leaderboard, ensuring transparent, reproducible, and equitable evaluation. By providing a continuously updated, community-wide reference for performance comparison, Energy-Arena.org establishes a consistent standard for measuring advancements in energy forecasting.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior Prediction
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Planning with Language Models
• Machine Learning: Time-Series/Data Streams

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

Energy forecasting research faces a persistent comparability gap that makes it difficult to measure consistent progress over time. Reported accuracy gains are often not directly comparable because models are evaluated under study-specific datasets, time periods, information sets, and scoring setups, while widely used benchmarks and competition datasets are typically tied to fixed historical windows. This paper introduces the Energy-Arena, a dynamic benchmarking platform for operational energy time series forecasting that provides a continuously updated reference point as energy systems evolve. The platform operates as an open, API-based submission system and standardizes challenge definitions and submission deadlines aligned with operational constraints. Performance is reported on rolling evaluation windows via persistent leaderboards. By moving from retrospective backtesting to forward-looking benchmarking, the Energy-Arena enforces standardized ex-ante submission and ex-post evaluation, thereby improving transparency by preventing information leakage and retroactive tuning. The platform is publicly available at Energy-Arena.org.

Problem

• energy forecasting
• benchmarking
• comparability gap
• dynamic evaluation
• operational forecasting

Innovation

• dynamic benchmarking
• energy forecasting
• ex-ante submission
• rolling evaluation
• API-based platform