Systematic Evaluation of TabPFN-TS and Chronos-2 for Zero-Shot Heat Load Forecasting in District Heating Networks

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2608.20024v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: District heating energy hubs require reliable heat load forecasts for efficient operational scheduling. Forecasting models trained on historical data may require retraining as networks evolve. Zero-shot time-series foundation models and in-context forecasting therefore offer a promising alternative: they can adapt at inference time from recent observations rather than by repeated retraining. This study systematically evaluates TabPFN-TS and Chronos-2 for probabilistic heat load forecasting in two German district heating networks and compares them with trained baselines. We assess whether TabPFN-TS, whose underlying model is pretrained entirely on synthetic tabular rather than time-series data, can capture complex district heating dynamics