Decentralized Energy Management of Microgrid Based on Blockchain-Empowered Consensus Algorithm With Collusion Prevention

The concern for privacy and scalability has motivated a paradigm shift to decentralized energy management methods in microgrids. The absence of a central authority brings significant challenges to promote trusted collaboration and avoid collusion. To address these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-empowered microgrid energy management framework, which adopts a novel consensus-based algorithm with a collusion prevention mechanism. Aiming at social welfare maximization, the energy management problem is formulated into a convex and decomposable form, which can be solved in a decentralized manner. To prevent the collusion between malicious agents, we propose a random information transmission mechanism empowered by the blockchain smart contract to replace the time-invariant communication topology. The consensus-based algorithm is extended to obtain the optimal solution of the energy management problem on the random and time-varying communication topology. We theoretically proved that the proposed algorithm converges to the global optimal solution with a probability of 1, without violating the physical constraints of individual agents. The effectiveness of the proposed method was validated by multiple experiments, both within the simulation environment and on a hardware system.