Electrical power system (EPS) forecasting plays a significant role in economic and social development but it remains an extremely challenging task. Because of its significance, relevant studies on EPS are especially needed. More specifically, only a few of the previous studies in this area conducted in-depth investigations of the entire EPS forecasting and merely focused on modeling individual signals centered on wind speed or electrical load. Moreover, most of these past studies concentrated on accuracy improvements and usually ignore the significance of forecasting stability. Therefore, to simultaneously achieve high accuracy and dependable stability, a hybrid forecasting framework based on the multi objective dragonfly algorithm (MODA) was successfully developed in this study. The framework consists of four modules data preprocessing, optimization, forecasting, and evaluation modules. In this framework, MODA is employed to optimize the Elman neural network (ENN) model as a part of the optimization module to overcome the drawbacks of single-objective optimization algorithms. In addition, data preprocessing and evaluation modules are incorporated to improve forecasting performance and conduct a comprehensive evaluation for this framework, respectively. Empirical results reveal that the developed forecasting framework can be an effective tool for the planning and management of power grids. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.