Aron Laszka, Scott Eisele, Abhishek Dubey, Gabor Karsai, Karla Kvaternik
24th IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ICPADS 2018, Singapore, December 11-13, 2018 2018
Transactive energy systems require mechanisms for distributed market participants to coordinate energy production and consumption without centralized control, but face challenges with privacy, reliability, and fair resource allocation. TRANSAX is innovative because it combines blockchain-based distributed ledgers for trust and transparency with optimization algorithms for efficient matching, enabling scalable transactive energy markets suitable for microgrids.
This paper presents TRANSAX, a blockchain-based decentralized energy trading platform for transactive microgrids that addresses three key challenges: privacy protection through encrypted transactions, resilience through distributed ledgers, and efficient resource allocation using smart contracts and linear programming. The system enables individual prosumers to autonomously trade energy with neighbors while maintaining system safety constraints and grid stability.
TRANSAX successfully enabled forward energy trading among distributed participants with multiple time horizons and flexible resource constraints. The platform maintained system stability by enforcing feeder capacity constraints while maximizing total energy traded. Smart contracts verified transaction feasibility before blockchain execution, and the hybrid solver architecture solved large-scale resource allocation problems efficiently.
@inproceedings{Laszka2018,
author = {Laszka, Aron and Eisele, Scott and Dubey, Abhishek and Karsai, Gabor and Kvaternik, Karla},
booktitle = {24th {IEEE} International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, {ICPADS} 2018, Singapore, December 11-13, 2018},
title = {TRANSAX:} {A} Blockchain-Based Decentralized Forward-Trading Energy Exchanged for Transactive Microgrids},
year = {2018},
pages = {918--927},
acceptance = {37.7},
abstract = {Power grids are undergoing major changes due to rapid growth in renewable energy and improvements in battery technology. Prompted by the increasing complexity of power systems, decentralized IoT solutions are emerging, which arrange local communities into transactive microgrids. The core functionality of these solutions is to provide mechanisms for matching producers with consumers while ensuring system safety. However, there are multiple challenges that these solutions still face: privacy, trust, and resilience. The privacy challenge arises because the time series of production and consumption data for each participant is sensitive and may be used to infer personal information. Trust is an issue because a producer or consumer can renege on the promised energy transfer. Providing resilience is challenging due to the possibility of failures in the infrastructure that is required to support these market based solutions. In this paper, we develop a rigorous solution for transactive microgrids that addresses all three challenges by providing an innovative combination of MILP solvers, smart contracts, and publish-subscribe middleware within a framework of a novel distributed application platform, called Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid. Towards this purpose, we describe the key architectural concepts, including fault tolerance, and show the trade-off between market efficiency and resource requirements.},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/icpads/LaszkaEDKK18},
category = {selectiveconference},
contribution = {lead},
doi = {10.1109/PADSW.2018.8645001},
file = {:Laszka2018-TRANSAX_A_Blockchain-Based_Decentralized_Forward-Trading_Energy_Exchanged_for_Transactive_Microgrids.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {transactive energy, blockchain, smart contracts, energy trading, microgrids},
project = {transactive-energy,cps-blockchains},
tag = {decentralization,power},
timestamp = {Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:14:56 +0200},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/PADSW.2018.8645001}
}