Privacy-Preserving Distributed Economic Dispatch of Microgrids: A Dynamic Quantization-Based Consensus Scheme With Homomorphic Encryption

This paper is concerned with the privacy-preserving distributed economic dispatch problem (ED) of microgrids. A homomorphically encrypted consensus algorithm is developed in the absence of a third party to achieve optimal power distribution with the least cost while preventing sensitive information leakage during the entire communication process. For ease of data encryption, a novel estimator-like dynamic quantizer is first constructed, where the information to be transmitted is converted into a series of finite-level codewords. Then, a sufficient condition is derived, taking advantage of mathematical induction and the properties of matrix norms, to ensure that the quantization output is unsaturated and exact consensus is reached. Furthermore, by means of the additive homomorphic property of the Paillier algorithm to embed secrecy in pairwise interaction dynamics, the confidential communication strategy is adopted to ensure that the distributed algorithm converges to the optimal value without disclosing private or sensitive state information of agents. Finally, case studies are provided to illustrate the feasibility and validity of the adopted privacy-preserving ED scheme in IEEE 39-bus power systems.