Privacy-Preserving Combined Heat and Power Dispatch Based on Information Masking Mechanism: A Decentralized Perspective

Combined heat and power dispatch (CHPD) has aroused widespread attention nowadays due to its great potentiality and cost-effectiveness for wind accommodation. However, the CHPD requires the joint operation of multiple energy agents, and the traditional dispatch scheme is inapplicable in engineering practice due to the demand for privacy preservation among energy agents. To tackle this issue, a privacy-preserving method based on the information masking (IM) mechanism is proposed, which converts the original CHPD problem into another masked CHPD problem by obscuring the privacy parameters of the electric power systems and district heating systems. Furthermore, considering the absence of a third party in practice, we develop an improved IM mechanism based on blockchain, enabling privacy preservation in a fully decentralized framework. Numerical simulations conducted across different cases testify the effectiveness of the proposed privacy-preserving method and tests based on an actual system in Jilin province demonstrate the feasibility of application in practice. The computational performance of the proposed method is validated as well.