Cost-effective and privacy-preserving energy management for smart meters

Lei Yang, Xu Chen, Junshan Zhang, H. Vincent Poor

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

113 Scopus citations

Abstract

Smart meters, designed for information collection and system monitoring in smart grid, report fine-grained power consumption to utility providers. With these highly accurate profiles of energy usage, however, it is possible to identify consumers' specific activities or behavior patterns, thereby giving rise to serious privacy concerns. This paper addresses these concerns by designing a cost-effective and privacy-preserving energy management technique that uses a rechargeable battery. From a holistic perspective, a dynamic programming framework is designed for consumers to strike a tradeoff between smart meter data privacy and the cost of electricity. In general, a major challenge in solving dynamic programming problems lies in the need for the knowledge of future electricity consumption events. By exploring the underlying structure of the original problem, an equivalent problem is derived, which can be solved by using only the current observations. An online control algorithm is then developed to solve the equivalent problem based on the Lyapunov optimization technique. It is shown that without the knowledge of the statistics of the time-varying load requirements and the electricity price processes, the proposed online control algorithm, parametrized by a positive value {V}, is within {O} (1/ {V} ) of the optimal solution to the original problem, where the maximum value of {V} is limited by the battery capacity. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated through extensive numerical analysis using real data.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number6876215
Pages (from-to)486-495
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Transactions on Smart Grid
Volume6
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2015
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Computer Science

Keywords

  • Battery
  • cost saving
  • data privacy
  • load monitor
  • smart grid
  • smart meter

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