Tariff selection for electric vehicles

Fabian Knirsch together with Andreas Unterweger and Dominik Engel researched the use of privacy preserving blockchain technology in the energy trade for electric vehicles charging stations.

Last week Fabian presented their results on “Privacy-preserving block-chain-based electric vehicle charging with dynamic tariff decisions” at the D-A-CH+ Energieinformatik 2017, the renowned conference in the field of energy informatics.

Electric vehicles are gaining widespread adoption and are a key component in the establishment of the smart grid. Beside the increasing number of electric vehicles, a dense and widespread charging infrastructure will be required.
This offers the opportunity for a broad range of different energy providers and charging station operators, both of which can offer energy at different prices depending on demand and supply. While customers benefit from a liberalized market and a wide selection of tariff options, such dynamic pricing use cases are subject to privacy issues and allow to detect the customer’s position and to track vehicles for, e.g., targeted advertisements.
This paper presents a reliable, automated and privacy-preserving selection of charging stations based on pricing and the distance to the electric vehicle. The protocol builds on a blockchain where electric vehicles signal their demand and charging stations send bids similar to an auction. The electric vehicle owner then decides on a particular charging station based on the supply-side offers it receives. This paper shows that the use of blockchains increases the reliability and the transparency of this approach while preserving the privacy of the electric vehicle owners.

For further details, please see:

  • [PDF] [DOI] F. Knirsch, A. Unterweger, and D. Engel, “Privacy-preserving blockchain-based electric vehicle charging with dynamic tariff decisions,” Computer Science – Research and Development, 2017.
    [Bibtex]
    @Article{Knirsch17c,
    author = {Knirsch, Fabian and Unterweger, Andreas and Engel, Dominik},
    title = {Privacy-preserving blockchain-based electric vehicle charging with dynamic tariff decisions},
    journal = {Computer Science - Research and Development},
    year = {2017},
    month = {9},
    issn = {1865-2042},
    doi = {10.1007/s00450-017-0348-5},
    pdf = {https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs00450-017-0348-5.pdf},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-017-0348-5},
    }