Towards Incentive for Electrical Vehicles Demand Response with Location Privacy Guaranteeing in Microgrids

The rapid and wide adoption of microgrids (MGs) and the increasing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) have created a unique opportunity for the integration of these technologies. In this article, we address the issue of demand response of EVs during MG outages by leveraging Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology. Particularly, we investigate an auction trading market that allows EVs with surplus energy to act as sellers, and EVs that want to be charged to act as buyers. A novel distributed double auction scheme is proposed to allow each buyer EV to submit multiple bids to seller EVs in different parking lots. Nonetheless, the locations of buyer EVs could be inferred by an adversary through analyzing the valuations, posing serious privacy and security risks. In this regard, a valuation-based attack scheme is investigated to validate the potential privacy risk. To defend against such an attack, we present a location privacy-preserving double auction scheme, in which the MicroGrid Central Controller (MGCC) acts as the auctioneer, solving the social welfare maximization problem of matching buyers to sellers, and the cloud is used to conduct calculations for the auctioneer, protecting the privacy of participants via homomorphic encryption. Theoretical analysis is conducted to validate our auction scheme in satisfying the designed economic and privacy properties (e.g., strategy-proofness and $k$k-anonymity). The experimental results show that our auction scheme can not only mitigate the demand response problem in MGs, but also provides good performance with respect to social welfare, satisfaction ratio, computational and communication overhead, and privacy leakage.