Privacy Preserving Power Charging Coordination Scheme in the Smart Grid

To successfully carry out the expected functionalities, the future smart grid will rely heavily on data communications among different entities, which poses several security challenges for such a critical infrastructure. This chapter discusses security requirements in the smart grid with a special focus on one application scenario, namely charging coordination. Vast-scale, simultaneous charging of energy storage units (ESUs), including electric vehicles (EVs) and home batteries, stresses the distribution system and may prompt power outages in severe conditions. To avoid such circumstances and fully utilize the accessible power, a charging coordination scheme ought to be employed. However, this requires conveying few data that can expose sensitive information, including the EV's location, the activities of a house dwellers, etc. In this chapter, we present a privacy-preserving power-charging coordination scheme. Each ESU sends a charging request to an aggregator to forward it to the charging controller. The charging requests do not disclose any private information to the aggregator, and the charging controller can get enough data to run the proposed charging coordination scheme; however, it cannot link the data to specific ESUs. Using the available data, a charging coordination scheme in light of a modified knapsack problem formulation is employed to compute the charging schedules of the ESUs. The objective is to maximize the number of charged ESUs before the charging requests expire without surpassing the accessible maximum charging limit. The proposed privacy-preserving power-charging coordination scheme reveals an interesting trade-off between the charging coordination performance and privacy preservation at low charging request rates, and such a trade-off diminishes as the charging request rate increases.