Operationalising an End-to-End MLOps Lifecycle for Energy Forecasting: Implementation and Controlled Evaluation on ClearML

Operational energy-forecasting pipelines require traceable execution from data ingestion to monitoring, yet few studies evaluate whether such pipelines continue to enforce quality controls when inputs or configurations are degraded. This study implements a previously proposed seven-phase forecasting lifecycle as a configuration-driven system on a self-hosted ClearML platform. The implementation is organised into five architectural domains: data and configuration, lifecycle phases and gates, orchestration, document artifact governance, and human-in-the-loop oversight. The pipeline is evaluated through six runs on four years of hourly electricity-consumption data from a Norwegian kindergarten building. Two baseline runs, in automatic and human-in-the-loop modes, demonstrate end-to-end execution and produce an XGBoost champion model with a 24-h-ahead test RMSE of 1.19 kW. Four controlled variants then test the validation-route logic by injecting missing data, shuffled consumption values, restrictive feature selection, and missing foundation-document sections. The first three variants are detected by phase-level sub-checkpoints, while the fourth is detected by Gate 0 through document-structure validation. The runs exercise revise-and-recover, override-then-terminate, and immediate-abort response pathways. The evaluation therefore demonstrates lifecycle execution, validation-route behaviour, and artifact traceability under controlled conditions; claims about live-deployment performance and multi-building generalisation are out of scope and identified as next steps.