A Privacy Preserving Multiagent System for Load Balancing in the Smart Grid

To improve system economics and reliability, microgrids (viz. power consumers equipped with local generators) can cooperatively utilize their local energy to facilitate load balancing on the power grid (balancing the regional supply and demand) via a multiagent system. However, due to the privacy concerns on continuously revealing each microgrid's local data (e.g., demand and supply at different times) for deriving real-time optimal balancing decisions, the application of such multiagent cooperation is still limited. In this paper, we design a novel privacy preserving multiagent system via an efficient cryptographic protocol for cooperatively balancing the regional supply and demand, as well as each microgrid's local supply and demand without disclosing their local data.