Local energy generation and peer to peer (P2P) energy trading in the local market can reduce the energy consumption cost, emission of harmful gases (as renewable energy sources are used to generate energy at user's premises) and increase the smart grid resilience. However, local energy trading with peers can have trust and privacy issues. A centralized system can be used to manage this energy trading but it increases the overall cost of the system and also faces several issues. In this paper, to implement a hybrid P2P energy trading market, a blockchain-based system is proposed. It is fully decentralized and allows the market members to interact with each other and trade energy without involving a third party. Smart contracts play a very important role in the blockchain-based energy trading market. They contain all the necessary rules for energy trading. We have proposed three smart contracts to implement the hybrid electricity trading market. The market members interact with the main smart contract, which requests P2P and prosumer to grid smart contracts for further processing. The main objectives of this paper are to propose a model to implement an efficient hybrid energy trading market while reducing cost and peak to average ratio of electricity.

In this paper, a blockchain-based secure data sharing mechanism is proposed for Vehicular Networks (VNs). Edge service providers are introduced along with ordinary nodes to efficiently manage service provisioning. The edge service providers are placed in the neighborhood of the ordinary nodes to ensure smooth communication between them. The huge amount of data generated by smart vehicles is stored in a distributed file storage system, known as Interplanetary File System (IPFS). It is used to tackle the issues related to data storage in centralized architectures, such as data tampering, lack of privacy, vulnerability to hackers, etc. Monetary incentives are given to edge vehicle nodes to motivate them for accurate and timely service provisioning to ordinary nodes. In response, ordinary nodes give reviews to the edge nodes against the services provided by them, which are further stored in a blockchain to ensure integrity, security and transparency. Smart contracts are used to automate the system processes without the inclusion of an intermediate party and to check the reviews given to the edge nodes. To optimize gas consumption and to enhance the system performance, a Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism is used to validate the transactions. Moreover, a caching system is introduced at the edge nodes to store frequently used services. Furthermore, both security and privacy are enhanced in the proposed system by incorporating a symmetric key cryptographic mechanism. A trust management mechanism is also proposed in this work to calculate the nodes’ reputation values based upon their trust values. These values determine the authenticity of the nodes involved in the network. Eventually, it is concluded from the simulation results that the proposed system is efficient for VNs.

The drastic increase in real-time vehicle generated data of various types has imparted a great concept of data trading in vehicular networks. Whereas immense usage of Electric Vehicles (EVs) as mobile energy carriers have supported distributed energy trading due to their bidirectional charging and discharging capabilities. The trustless environment of Internet of Electric Vehicles (IoEV), including fuel vehicles and EVs, encounters trading disputes and conflicting interests among trading parties. To address these challenges, we exploit consortium blockchain to maintain transparency and trust in trading activities. Smart contracts are used to tackle trading disputes and illegal actions. Data duplication problem occurs when a dishonest user sell previously traded data multiple times for financial gain. Therefore, data duplication validation is done through previously stored hash-list at roadside units (RSUs) employed with bloom filters for efficient data lookup. Removing data duplication at an earlier stage reduces storage cost. Moreover, an elliptic curve bilinear pairing based digital signature scheme is used to ensure the reliability and integrity of traded data. To ensure persistent availability of traded data, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is used, which provides fault-tolerant and a reliable data storage without any single point of failure. On the other hand, the energy trading transactions among EVs face some security and privacy protection challenges. An adversary can infer the energy trading records of EVs, and launch the data linkage attacks. To address this issue, an account generation technique is used that hides the energy trading trends. The new account generation for an EV depends upon its traded volume of energy. The experimental results verify the efficiency of the proposed data and energy trading scheme in IoEV with the reliable and secure data storage.

A Smart Grid (SG) is a modernized grid to provide efficient, reliable and economic energy to the consumers. Energy is the most important resource in the world. An efficient energy distribution is required as smart devices are increasing dramatically. The forecasting of electricity consumption is supposed to be a major constituent to enhance the performance of SG. Various learning algorithms have been proposed to solve the forecasting problem. The sole purpose of this work is to predict the price and load efficiently. The first technique is Enhanced Logistic Regression (ELR) and the second technique is Enhanced Recurrent Extreme Learning Machine (ERELM). ELR is an enhanced form of Logistic Regression (LR), whereas, ERELM optimizes weights and biases using a Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO). Classification and Regression Tree (CART), Relief-F and Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) are used for feature selection and extraction. On the basis of selected features, classification is performed using ELR. Cross validation is done for ERELM using Monte Carlo and K-Fold methods. The simulations are performed on two different datasets. The first dataset, i.e., UMass Electric Dataset is multi-variate while the second dataset, i.e., UCI Dataset is uni-variate. The first proposed model performed better with UMass Electric Dataset than UCI Dataset and the accuracy of second model is better with UCI than UMass. The prediction accuracy is analyzed on the basis of four different performance metrics: Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Square Error (MSE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). The proposed techniques are then compared with four benchmark schemes. The comparison is done to verify the adaptivity of the proposed techniques. The simulation results show that the proposed techniques outperformed benchmark schemes. The proposed techniques efficiently increased the prediction accuracy of load and price. However, the computational time is increased in both scenarios. ELR achieved almost 5% better results than Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and almost 3% than LR. While, ERELM achieved almost 6% better results than ELM and almost 5% than RELM. However, the computational time is almost 20% increased with ELR and 50% with ERELM. Scalability is also addressed for the proposed techniques using half-yearly and yearly datasets. Simulation results show that ELR gives 5% better results while, ERELM gives 6% better results when used for yearly dataset.

Electricity theft (ET) is an utmost problem for power utilities because it threatens public safety, disturbs the normal working of grid infrastructure and increases revenue losses. In the literature, many machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and statistical based models are introduced to detect ET. However, these models do not give optimal results due to the following reasons: curse of dimensionality, class imbalance problem, inappropriate hyper-parameter tuning of ML and DL models, etc. Keeping the aforementioned concerns in view, we introduce a hybrid DL model for the efficient detection of electricity thieves in smart grids. AlexNet is utilized to handle the curse of dimensionality issue while the final classification of energy thieves and normal consumers is performed through adaptive boosting (AdaBoost). Moreover, class imbalance problem is resolved using an undersampling technique, named as near miss. Furthermore, hyper-parameters of AdaBoost and AlexNet are tuned using artificial bee colony optimization algorithm. The real smart meters’ dataset is used to assess the efficacy of the hybrid model. The substantial amount of simulations proves that the hybrid model obtains the highest classification results as compared to its counterparts. Our proposed model obtains 88%, 86%, 84%, 85%, 78% and 91% accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, Matthew correlation coefficient and area under the curve receiver operating characteristics, respectively.