Multi-Party Dynamic State Estimation That Preserves Data and Model Privacy

In this paper we focus on the dynamic state estimation which harnesses a vast amount of sensing data harvested by multiple parties and recognize that in many applications, to improve collaborations between parties, the estimation procedure must be designed with the awareness of protecting participants’ data and model privacy, where the latter refers to the privacy of key parameters of observation models. We develop a state estimation paradigm for the scenario where multiple parties with data and model privacy concerns are involved. Multiple parties monitor a physical dynamic process by deploying their own sensor networks and update the state estimate according to the average state estimate of all the parties calculated by a cloud server and security module. The paradigm taps additively homomorphic encryption which enables the cloud server and security module to jointly fuse parties’ data while preserving the data privacy. Meanwhile, all the parties collaboratively develop a stable (or optimal) fusion rule without divulging sensitive model information. For the proposed filtering paradigm, we analyze the stabilization and the optimality. First, to stabilize the multi-party state estimator while preserving observation model privacy, two stabilization design methods are proposed. For special scenarios, the parties directly design their estimator gains by the matrix norm relaxation. For general scenarios, after transforming the original design problem into a convex semi-definite programming problem, the parties collaboratively derive suitable estimator gains based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Second, an optimal collaborative gain design method with model privacy guarantees is provided, which results in the asymptotic minimum mean square error (MMSE) state estimation. Finally, numerical examples are presented to illustrate our design and theoretical findings.