Anti-cheating prosumer energy exchange based on indirect reciprocity

Equipped with renewable energy generators, pro-sumers produce, store and consume energy and become an important entity in smart grids. With time-variant power demands and generation capacities, prosumers can exchange energy via local power lines with less transmission loss than the long-distance power lines to the traditional power plants. In this paper, we develop a local power exchange game and address the cheating problem that seller prosumers actually supply insufficient energy instead of the promised amount in the trade. We apply the indirect reciprocity principle to build an anti-cheating local energy exchange system that maintains reputations for the prosumers according to their selling histories. By supplying less energy to the buyers who cheated in previous trades, this system motivates the autonomous prosumers to cooperate instead of cheating. Simulation results have shown that this strategy significantly reduces the number of cheating prosumers and improves the overall system utility. Compared with the direct reciprocity-based counterpart, this system reaches the desirable equilibrium much faster and requires less energy from the traditional energy plants.