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The thermal inertia of buildings brings considerable flexibility to the heating and cooling load, which is known to be a promising demand response resource. The aggregate model that can describe the thermal dynamics of the building cluster is an important interference for energy systems to exploit its intrinsic thermal inertia. However, the private information of users, such as the indoor temperature and heating/cooling power, needs to be collected in the parameter estimation procedure to obtain the aggregate model, causing severe privacy concerns. In light of this, we propose a novel privacy-preserved parameter estimation approach to infer the aggregate model for the thermal dynamics of the building cluster for the first time. Using it, the parameters of the aggregate thermal dynamic model (ATDM) can be obtained by the load aggregator without accessing the individual's privacy information. More specifically, this method not only exploits the block coordinate descent (BCD) method to resolve its non-convexity in the estimation but investigates the transformation-based encryption (TE) associated with its secure aggregation protocol (SAP) techniques to realize privacy-preserved computation. Its capability of preserving privacy is also theoretically proven. Finally, simulation results using real-world data demonstrate the accuracy and privacy-preserved performance of our proposed method.

The study of complex networks has significantly advanced our understanding of community structures which serves as a crucial feature of real-world graphs. Detecting communities in graphs is a challenging problem with applications in sociology, biology, and computer science. Despite the efforts of an interdisciplinary community of scientists, a satisfactory solution to this problem has not yet been achieved. This review article delves into the topic of community detection in graphs, which serves as a thorough exposition of various community detection methods from perspectives of modularity-based method, spectral clustering, probabilistic modelling, and deep learning. Along with the methods, a new community detection method designed by us is also presented. Additionally, the performance of these methods on the datasets with and without ground truth is compared. In conclusion, this comprehensive review provides a deep understanding of community detection in graphs.

This paper proposes a doubled-sided auction mechanism with price discrimination for social welfare (SW) maximization in the electricity and heating market. In this mechanism, energy service providers (ESPs) submit offers and load aggregators (LAs) submit bids to an energy trading center (ETC) to maximize their utility; in turn, the selfless ETC as an auctioneer leverages dis-criminatory price weights to regulate the behaviors of ESPs and LAs, which combines the individual benefits of each stakeholder with the overall social welfare to achieve the global optimum. Nash games are employed to describe the interactions between players with the same market role. Theoretically, we first prove the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium; then, considering the requirement of game players to preserve privacy, a distributed algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers is developed to implement distributed bidding and analytical target cascading algorithm is applied to reach the balance of demand and supply. We validated the proposed mechanism using case studies on a city-level distribution system. The results indicated that the achieved SW improved by 4%-15% compared with other mechanisms, and also verified the effectiveness of the distributed algorithm.

Facing the dilemma of growing energy demand and mitigating carbon emissions, this paper proposes an energy sharing mechanism based on virtual federated prosumers (VFPs) with budget allocation for joint electricity and carbon market to incentivize distributed energy resources to participate in the hierarchical market and reduce carbon emissions. At the transmission level, the regional transmission operator coordinates transactions between two markets, the inter-VFP energy sharing market and the wholesale market, intending to minimize the overall cost of VFPs. The energy sharing market clearing problem is formulated as a generalized Nash game, for which we develop a first-order response algorithm to obtain the equilibrium. At the distribution level, the VFPs play the role of selfless auctioneer that leverage discriminatory weights and benchmark prices to allocate the electricity-carbon budget among entities in the VFP to maximize social welfare. The Nash game is exploited to characterize the budget allocation problem, for which a distributed feedback allocation algorithm is proposed. The entire hierarchical electricity and carbon trading is modeled as an equilibrium problem and is solved iteratively. Case studies based on a practical regional grid verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and show that the mechanism is effective in improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions.