A consensus-based privacy-preserving energy management strategy for microgrids with event-triggered scheme

Abstract

In terms of the distributed energy management (DEM) in microgrids, increasing distributed generators and users will bring tremendous data transmitted in the communication network. Considering the data security and the computation efficiency, protecting the participants’ privacy and saving the communication network resources are essential. This paper proposes a consensus-based distributed privacy-preserving energy management strategy with the event-triggered scheme to achieve privacy-preserving and network resource-saving simultaneously. Firstly, the DEM in microgrids is formulated as a social welfare maximization problem. Then the privacy disclosure of both generators and consumers under the consensus-based distributed control strategy is analyzed. Next, a consensus-based privacy-preserving algorithm using differential privacy is designed to protect private information. An event-triggered scheme is applied to the strategy to save network resources. Besides, theoretical analysis, including convergence, accuracy and differential privacy, is presented to guarantee the algorithm’s sufficiency. The trade-off between the accuracy and privacy level is also investigated. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.