Blockchain-based Efficient Energy Trading Platform
Ongoing
The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a secure and efficient Blockchain-based decentralized trading platform for electrical vehicle (EV) charging. In a scenario where local renewable energy providers (EPs) can supply public charging stations, through the smart grid, EV drivers can use our trading platform to trade energy directly with any of the available EPs and optimally plan for their charging operations without any kind of intermediaries. The proposed trading platform ensure two main characteristics that make it attractive and promote its early adoption; (1) A new blockchain-based trading architecture that keeps relying on the legacy billing and metering of the already in place utility company to avoid making major changes to the existing infrastructure and thus, promotes its earlier adoption and deployment. (2) The proposed platform employs a new pricing scheme that is based on a second-price auction mechanism to ensure both effective matching of bids and the corresponding social welfare.
The proposed pricing scheme assures incentive compatibility (truthfulness) and prevent opportunistic behavior between EVs and energy suppliers. In addition, to validate and assess the performance of the proposed trading platform, we have developed a testing framework that is based on lightweight virtualization to emulate a private Ethereum blockchain network. The obtained results demonstrate that the developed platform can reach a throughput of about 350 tx/sec. and an average transaction latency of 3 seconds. These results show that the current Ethereum implementation can satisfactorily support EV charging requests from crowded city in peak hours.
