Privacy-Preserving Context-Based Electric Vehicle Dispatching for Energy Scheduling in Microgrids: An Online Learning Approach

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are beginning to play a key role in the fast developing area of Internet of Things (IoT). Numerous results have shown the feasibility of vehicle-to-building (V2B) mode of charge/discharge, where EVs are considered as dynamically configurable dispersed energy storage units. When properly incorporated into the building energy system, EVs are able to provide ancillary services to the power grid during high demand periods or outage situations. The arising challenge is how to act intelligent behaviors in complex and changing microgrid environments. With the aim of minimizing the cost and maximizing satisfaction degree, this paper, unlike previous works, jointly considers the building energy need and the safety/willingness of EVs to find and dispatch the optimal vehicle to conduct auxiliary or supportive actions. To realize that, we propose an intelligent Privacy-preserving Context-based Online EV Dispatching System (PCOEDS), using a tree-based structure which supports the ever-increasing big metering datasets with context-awareness. Moreover, privacy preservation and security protection on both sides of the the energy transmission process are well guaranteed in our work. Theoretical results validate that our intelligent dispatching system achieves sublinear regret and differential privacy, which outperforms other online learning method when applied to a huge city-level dataset.