A Federated Byzantine Agreement Model to Operate Offline Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment

Providing equitable and resilient electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) to remote locations with limited access to the Internet infrastructure is one of the paradoxes in the decarbonization plan. In this paper, we develop an electric vehicle (EV) charging management system comprised of offline EVSEs based on a Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) system. To enable offline peer-to-peer (P2P) authentication between the user’s device (UD) and EVSE stations, we use a distributed certificate management based on Shamir’s algorithm and blind signing approach using the ring signature. We introduce extended FBA for charge point operator (FBA-CPO) systems and include explicit operational functions to ensure the ledger dissemination and scalability of the network. We specifically employ a pre-authorized mechanism for deferral vouchers using a pre-signed and weighted signing method. In the FBA-CPO network, each charger records all transactions on a local ledger and publicly publishes ledgers through random UD nodes. Under a generalization of the property of the federated quorum system, the proposed approach could provide a reliable network centrality with or without offline EVSEs. Eventually, we examined the performance of the proposed model using a system of real devices and their digital twins. Results show the FBA-CPO satisfies all functional and cross-cutting requirements for a consistent transnational mechanism.