Dynamic pricing in industrial internet of things: Blockchain application for energy management in smart cities

Abstract With the advent of advancements in the power sector, various new methods have been devised to meet modern society’s electricity needs. To cope with these large sets of electronic device’s current requirements, better energy distribution is needed. Smart Grid (SG) facilitates energy providers to distribute electricity efficiently to the user according to their particular requirements. Recent advancements enable SG to monitor, analyze, control and coordinate for the demand and supply of electricity efficiency and energy saving. SG also allows two-way real-time communication between utilities and customers using cloud and Fog enabled infrastructures. SG minimizes management and operations cost, electricity theft, electricity losses, and maximize user comfort by giving the user choice about their energy use. It also facilitates Renewable Energy Resources (RER) and electric vehicles. Blockchain is a promising technology, provides the necessary features to solve most of these issues. Current Issues include saving a large amount of data, deletion, tampering, and revision of data. It also eliminates the necessity of intermediaries. Inherent security, along with the distributed nature, makes it a perfect candidate for improving the overall services. The rules of the smart contract are automatically enforced upon execution. Smart contracts are enhanced in a way that per-unit price is calculated dynamically based upon RER and utilities generated energy units in the overall grid. The system is also automated in a way that electricity is transferred from one resident (or service) to another resident according to their requirements. The exchange of energy is done via a smart contract after checking the needs of each participant. Each participant defines their requirements at the time of the registration and can update these thresholds. The privacy protection scheme has higher security, shown by theoretical security analysis. The main contributions of our work are two-fold; Using smart contracts to automate the bidding process for transactions based upon supply and demand for energy in smart cities. Secondly, at the same time, using hyper ledger fabric and composer to leveraging Blockchain to uphold privacy, anonymity, and confidentiality at the same time giving the users ability to have dynamic pricing based on supply and demand.