Distributed Multi-Unit Privacy Assured Bidding (PAB) for Smart Grid Demand Response Programs

The stringent requirement of the demand-supply equilibrium for delivering electricity has traditionally been dealt with a supply-side perspective, assuming that the demand is not alterable. With the promises of the smart grid, demand-side management techniques are increasingly becoming more feasible. A demand-side management technique, called demand response (DR), aims at inducing changes in electricity load in response to financial incentives, some of which involve bidding as the underlying facilitator. It is well-established that the effectiveness of the DR is proportional to the number of participants. Yet, many of the DR programs, including those involving bidding, may suffer due to consumer privacy concerns. Within this context, in this paper, we propose a distributed and multi-unit privacy guaranteeing bidding mechanism as part of a DR program without relying on any third party, trusted or not, to protect the participants' bidding information, except obviously for the winning price and the winner exposed to the utility. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such approach for the DR bidding programs. We provide a security analysis of our approach under the honest-but-curious and active adversary assumptions and prove the privacy assuring property.