TWC: Small: Privacy Preserving Cooperation among Microgrids for Efficient Load Management on the Grid

智能电网将传感器和通信基础设施集成到现有电网中，以实现运营智能。微电网的概念正在与智能电网一起出现，在智能电网中，电网的一小部分可以被隔离成自给自足的岛屿，以用当地的能源(如风能、太阳能)满足自己的需求。到目前为止，微电网开始开发协作模型，以进一步提高全局和局部负荷管理的性能，如全局/局部负载平衡、能量交换以及与微网集成的输电网拓扑设计/升级。然而，微电网之间的所有合作都要求它们显式地共享本地敏感的电网运行信息，以实现全局性能优化，从而危及微电网的隐私。然后，微电网的隐私问题将阻碍合作模式的开发和实施，从而可能无法通过微电网在电网上的合作获得重大好处。提出了一套新颖的分布式微网隐私保护协作模型/技术，以有效地推进电网负荷管理。通过用安全多方计算(SMC)理论组成密码原语和/或强加定义的严格隐私概念，在端到端的合作过程中确保可证明的隐私/安全，包括私下分析从不同微网收集的数据和私下实现从合作模型导出的方案/解决方案。通过严格的标准确保隐私保护，将允许以早些时候因隐私问题而被禁止的方式收集和使用数据，然后提高运营效率和用户接受度。通过隐私保护合作进行的负载管理在更安全、可靠和高效的智能电网基础设施中进一步优化分配分布式能源并将传输和存储成本降至最低。该项目还通过激励本科生加入科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)研究，将研究和教育结合在一起。

Smart grid integrates sensors and communication infrastructure into the existing power grid to enable operational intelligence. The concept of microgrid is emerging in conjunction with the smart grid wherein small segments of the grid can be isolated into self-sufficient islands to feed their own demand load with their local energy, e.g., wind, solar. To date, microgrids begin to develop cooperative models for further improving the performance of global and local load management, such as global/local load balancing, energy exchange, and power transmission network topology design/upgrade with the integration of microgrids. However, all the cooperation among microgrids requests them to explicitly share their local sensitive grid operational information for global performance optimization, and thus compromises the privacy of microgrids. Then, microgrids' privacy concerns would impede the development and implementation of the cooperative models such that significant benefits via microgrids' cooperation on the power grid may not be available. This project tackles the privacy concerns in such cooperation, and enables microgrids to efficiently manage their local loads as well as facilitate the main grid to manipulate the global load with limited disclosure.This project proposes a suite of novel privacy preserving cooperative models/techniques for distributed microgrids to efficiently advance load management on the power grid. Provable privacy/security is ensured in the end-to-end process of cooperation, including privately analyzing data collected from different microgrids and privately implementing the schemes/solutions derived from the cooperative models, by composing cryptographic primitives with the secure multiparty computation (SMC) theory and/or imposing defined rigorous privacy notions. Ensuring privacy protection with rigorous standards will allow data to be collected and used in ways that were prohibitive earlier due to the privacy concerns, and then improve both operational efficiency and user acceptance. Load management via privacy preserving cooperation further optimally allocates distributed energy and minimizes the transmission and storage costs in a more secure, reliable and efficient smart grid infrastructure. This project also integrates research and education by exciting undergraduates to join the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) research.