The growing success of smart grids (SGs) is driving increased interest in load forecasting (LF) as accurate predictions of energy demand are crucial for ensuring the reliability, stability, and efficiency of SGs. LF techniques aid SGs in making decisions related to power operation and planning upgrades, and can help provide efficient and reliable power services at fair prices. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), specifically in machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), have also played a significant role in improving the precision of demand forecasting. It is important to evaluate different LF techniques to identify the most accurate and appropriate one for use in SGs. This paper conducts a systematic review of state-of-the-art forecasting techniques, including traditional techniques, clustering-based techniques, AI-based techniques, and time series-based techniques, and provides an analysis of their performance and results. The aim of this paper is to determine which LF technique is most suitable for specific applications in SGs. The findings indicate that AI-based LF techniques, using ML and neural network (NN) models, have shown the best forecast performance compared to other methods, achieving higher overall root mean squared (RMS) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) values.

In this paper, we propose a decentralized ride-sharing service atop public Blockchain, named B-Ride. Both riders/drivers can learn whether they can share rides while preserving their trip data, including pick-up/drop-off location, departure/arrival date. However, malicious users exploit the anonymity provided by the public blockchain to submit multiple ride requests or offers, while not committing to any of them, to find a better offer or make system unreliable. B-Ride solves this problem by introducing a time-locked deposit protocol by leveraging smart contract and zero-knowledge set membership proof. In a nutshell, both driver and rider have to show their good will and commitment by sending a deposit to the blockchain. Later, a driver has to prove to the blockchain on the agreed pick-up time that he arrived at the pick-up location. To preserve rider/driver privacy by hiding the exact pick-up location, the proof is performed using zero-knowledge set membership proof. Moreover, to ensure fair payment, a pay-as-you-drive methodology is introduced using the elapsed distance of driver/rider. In addition, we introduce reputation model to rate drivers based on their past behaviour without involving third-parties. Finally, we implement our protocol Ethereum test-net. The experimental results show applicability of our protocol atop existing real-world blockchains.

An energy trading system is essential for the successful integration of Electric Vehicles (EVs) into the smart grid. In this paper, leveraging blockchain technology, we first propose a privacy-preserving charging-station-to-vehicle (CS2V) energy trading scheme. The CS2V scheme is useful in crowded cities where there is a need for a charging infrastructure that can charge many EVs daily. We also propose a privacy-preserving vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) energy trading scheme. The V2V scheme is useful when charging stations are not available or far and cheaper prices can be offered from EVs, e.g., if they charge from renewable energy sources. In the V2V scheme, the privacy of both charging and discharging EVs including location, time, and amount of power are preserved. To preserve privacy in both schemes, EVs are anonymous, however, a malicious EV may abuse the anonymity to launch Sybil attacks by pretending as multiple non-exiting EVs to launch powerful attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) by submitting multiple reservations/offers without committing to them, to prevent other EVs from charging and make the trading system unreliable. To thwart the Sybil attacks, we use a common prefix linkable anonymous authentication scheme, so that if an EV submits multiple reservations/offers at the same timeslot, the blockchain can identify such submissions. To further protect the privacy of EV drivers, we introduce an anonymous and efficient blockchain-based payment system that cannot link individual drivers to specific charging locations. Our experimental results indicate that our schemes are secure and privacy-preserving with low communication and computation overheads.

Energy forecasting is important because it enables infrastructure planning and power dispatching while reducing power outages and equipment failures. It is well-known that federated learning (FL) can be used to build a global energy predictor for smart grids without revealing the customers’ raw data to preserve privacy. However, it still reveals local models’ parameters during the training process, which may still leak customers’ data privacy. In addition, for the global model to converge, it requires multiple training rounds, which must be done in a communication-efficient way. Moreover, most existing works only focus on load forecasting while neglecting energy forecasting in net-metering systems. To address these limitations, in this article, we propose a privacy-preserving and communication-efficient FL-based energy predictor for net-metering systems. Based on a data set for real power consumption/generation readings, we first propose a multidata-source hybrid deep learning (DL)-based predictor to accurately predict future readings. Then, we repurpose an efficient inner-product functional encryption (IPFE) scheme for implementing secure data aggregation to preserve the customers’ privacy by encrypting their models’ parameters during the FL training. To address communication efficiency, we use a change and transmit (CAT) approach to update local model’s parameters, where only the parameters with sufficient changes are updated. Our extensive studies demonstrate that our approach accurately predicts future readings while providing privacy protection and high communication efficiency.

In advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), smart meters (SMs) are installed at the consumer side to send fine-grained power consumption readings periodically to the system operator (SO) for load monitoring, energy management, and billing. However, fraudulent consumers launch electricity theft cyber-attacks by reporting false readings to reduce their bills illegally. These attacks do not only cause financial losses but may also degrade the grid performance because the readings are used for grid management. To identify these attackers, the existing schemes employ machine-learning models using the consumers’ fine-grained readings, which violates the consumers’ privacy by revealing their lifestyle. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme that enables the SO to detect electricity theft, compute bills, and monitor load while preserving the consumers’ privacy. The idea is that SMs encrypt their readings using functional encryption, and the SO uses the ciphertexts to (i) compute the bills following dynamic pricing approach, (ii) monitor the grid load, and (iii) evaluate a machine-learning model to detect fraudulent consumers, without being able to learn the individual readings to preserve consumers’ privacy. We adapted a functional encryption scheme so that the encrypted readings are aggregated for billing and load monitoring and only the aggregated value is revealed to the SO. Also, we exploited the inner-product operations on encrypted readings to evaluate a machine-learning model to detect fraudulent consumers. Real dataset is used to evaluate our scheme, and our evaluations indicate that our scheme is secure and can detect fraudulent consumers accurately with low communication and computation overhead.

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have the potential to enable the next-generation Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In ITS, data contributed by vehicles can build a spatio-temporal view of traffic statistics, which can improve road safety and reduce slow traffic and jams. To preserve drivers’ privacy, vehicles should use multiple pseudonyms instead of only one identity. However, vehicles may exploit this abundance of pseudonyms and launch Sybil attacks by pretending to be multiple vehicles. Then, these Sybil (or fake) vehicles report false data, e.g., to create fake congestion or pollute traffic management data. In this article, we propose a Sybil attack detection scheme using proofs of work and location. The idea is that each road side unit (RSU) issues a signed time-stamped tag as a proof for the vehicle’s anonymous location. Proofs sent from multiple consecutive RSUs are used to create a trajectory which is used as vehicle anonymous identity. Also, contributions from one RSU are not enough to create trajectories, rather the contributions of several RSUs are needed. By this way, attackers need to compromise an infeasible number of RSUs to create fake trajectories. Moreover, upon receiving the proof of location from an RSU, the vehicle should solve a computational puzzle by running proof of work (PoW) algorithm. Then, it should provide a valid solution (proof of work) to the next RSU before it can obtain a proof of location. Using the PoW can prevent the vehicles from creating multiple trajectories in case of low-dense RSUs. To report an event, the vehicle has to send the latest trajectory to an event manager. Then, the event manager uses a matching technique to identify the trajectories sent from Sybil vehicles. The scheme depends on the fact that the Sybil trajectories are bounded physically to one vehicle, and therefore, their trajectories should overlap. Extensive experiments and simulations demonstrate that our scheme achieves high detection rate of Sybil attacks with low false negative and acceptable communication and computation overhead.