Research on dynamic cost prediction method for power technology upgrading projects based on improved transformer...

Accurate cost prediction is critical for the effective management of power grid technical renovation (PGTR) projects, yet conventional methods struggle to capture the nonlinear, multi-scale, and time-varying dynamics inherent in renovation cost data. This paper proposes an improved Transformer-based framework, MS-DW-Transformer, that combines parallel multi-scale convolutional encoding with a gated dynamic weight allocation mechanism and a trend-consistency auxiliary loss. We test the framework on 1,362 completed PGTR projects from a provincial grid corporation in eastern China, contrasting its behavior against classical baselines (BPNN, SVR, LSTM, GRU, vanilla Transformer) as well as more recent time-series Transformers (Informer, Autoformer, PatchTST, Temporal Fusion Transformer) and a graph-based learner. Across five independent runs the proposed model attains a mean MAPE of 6.83% (± 0.11) and an R² of 0.937 on the held-out test set, with paired-sample significance tests confirming that the gains over the strongest baselines are not artefacts of random variation. We additionally provide gate-activation trajectories, SHAP-based feature attribution, and sensitivity analyses for the window length and loss-weight coefficients, all of which back up - though never fully resolve - the case for the proposed design. The work, we should add, is calibrated to a single-province dataset; the generalizability claims should be read accordingly.