Security and Cloud Outsourcing Framework for Economic Dispatch

The computational complexity and problem sizes of power grid applications have increased significantly with the advent of renewable resources and smart grid technologies. The current paradigm of solving these issues consist of in-house high performance computing infrastructures, which have drawbacks of high capital expenditures, maintenance, and limited scalability. Cloud computing is an ideal alternative due to its powerful computational capacity, rapid scalability, and high cost-effectiveness. A major challenge, however, remains in that the highly confidential grid data is susceptible for potential cyberattacks when outsourced to the cloud. In this paper, a security and cloud outsourcing framework is developed for the economic dispatch (ED) linear programming application. The security framework transforms the ED linear program into a confidentiality-preserving linear program, that masks both the data and problem structure, thus enabling secure outsourcing to the cloud. Results show that for large grid test cases the performance gain and costs outperforms the in-house infrastructure.