Distributed privacy-preserving electric vehicle charging control based on secret sharing

Abstract

Cooperative electric vehicle (EV) charging control has emerged as a key component in grid-edge resource (GER) management. However, customers’ privacy remains a major barrier to large-scale implementation of EV charging control. In this paper, we develop a distributed privacy-preserving EV charging control protocol based on secret sharing (SS) that (1) achieves scalability over EV population size; (2) enjoys higher computation efficiency compared to homomorphic encryption (HE) based methods; and (3) secures the privacy of the participating EVs against honest-but-curious adversaries and external eavesdroppers. The cooperative EV charging control is formulated to achieve overnight valley filling and framed into the projected gradient algorithm (PGA) structure as a distributed optimization problem. SS is integrated into PGA to achieve secure updates of both primal and dual variables. Theoretical security analyses and simulations in a residential area are conducted to prove the privacy preservation guarantee as well as the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed privacy preservation method. Broadly, the proposed method can be readily extended to various GER control applications.