A Privacy-Preserving Consensus Mechanism for ADMM-Based Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading

Abstract

In the electricity market, prosumers are becoming more and more prevalent due to the fast development of distributed energy resources and demand response management, which also promote the appearance of peer-to-peer (P2P) trading mechanisms for energy. Optimization-based methods are efficient tools to design the P2P energy trading negotiation mechanism. However, the main drawback for market mechanisms based on optimization methods is that the incentive compatibility cannot be satisfied, which means participants can obtain more profit by providing untruthful biddings. To overcome this challenge, a novel consensus mechanism based on Proof of Solution (PoSo) is proposed for P2P energy trading. The optimization results will be verified by neighboring agents according to the KKT conditions in a fully decentralized and symmetric manner, which means agents will check each other’s solutions. However, the verification process may leak the private information of agents, and a privacy-preserving consensus mechanism is designed using Shamir’s secret sharing method. After that, we explore a method to realize that trusted agents can recover the right information even under the misbehavior of malicious agents by inheriting the philosophy of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed consensus mechanisms. In more detail, (1) when the message delivery success rate is not lower than 0.7, the consensus mechanisms almost guarantee success; (2) if the proportion of untrusted agents satisfies 4f+1≤Nωn, the proposed method guarantees the correctness of the consensus verification results; (3) the communication times among agents can be highly reduced by more than 60% by only verifying the optimality of the received results for the first three and last few iterations.