A Novel Cryptography-Based Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Optimization Paradigm

Existing large-scale optimization schemes are challenged by both scalability and cyber-security. With the favorable scalability, adaptability, and flexibility, decentralized and distributed optimization paradigms are widely adopted in cyber-physical system applications. However, most existing approaches heavily rely on explicit information exchange between agents or between agents and the system operator, leading the entire framework prone to privacy risks. To tackle this issue, this paper synthesizes cryptography and decentralized optimization techniques to develop a novel privacy-preserving decentralized optimization paradigm. The proposed paradigm is generically applicable to strongly coupled convex optimization problems with nonseparable objective functions and linearly coupled constraints. The security and accuracy of the proposed paradigm are verified via numerical examples.