  The power system is undergoing rapid evolution with the roll-out of advanced
metering infrastructure and local energy applications (e.g. electric vehicles)
as well as the increasing penetration of intermittent renewable energy at both
transmission and distribution level, which characterizes the peak load demand
with stronger randomness and less predictability and therefore poses a threat
to the power grid security. Since storing large quantities of electricity to
satisfy load demand is neither economically nor environmentally friendly,
effective peak demand management strategies and reliable peak load forecast
methods become essential for optimizing the power system operations. To this
end, this paper provides a timely and comprehensive overview of peak load
demand forecast methods in the literature. To our best knowledge, this is the
first comprehensive review on such topic. In this paper we first give a precise
and unified problem definition of peak load demand forecast. Second, 139 papers
on peak load forecast methods were systematically reviewed where methods were
classified into different stages based on the timeline. Thirdly, a comparative
analysis of peak load forecast methods are summarized and different optimizing
methods to improve the forecast performance are discussed. The paper ends with
a comprehensive summary of the reviewed papers and a discussion of potential
future research directions.
