X-NegoBox: An Explainable Privacy-Budget Negotiation Framework for Secure Peer-to-Peer Energy Data Exchange

2026-04-27

AI Summary

This work proposes an interpretable privacy budget negotiation framework to address privacy leakage and decision opacity faced by prosumers during peer-to-peer data exchange in decentralized energy systems. The framework safeguards raw data through local DataBoxes, dynamically allocates differential privacy budgets via an Autonomous Privacy Budget Negotiation Protocol (APBNP), and employs explainable contracts (X-Contracts) to generate human- and machine-readable justifications for decisions. By innovatively integrating dynamic privacy negotiation, risk-aware pricing, and explainability mechanisms, the approach enables the generation of privacy-preserving counteroffers. Experimental results in real-world energy market scenarios demonstrate that the method significantly reduces privacy leakage risks, improves request acceptance rates, and enhances both transparency and interpretability of negotiation outcomes.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Multiagent Systems: Agreement, Argumentation & Negotiation
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

The decentralization of modern energy systems is transforming consumers into prosumers who continuously exchange data with aggregators, peers, and market operators. While such data is essential for peer-to-peer trading, demand response, and distributed forecasting, it can reveal sensitive household patterns and introduce privacy risks. Existing data sharing mechanisms rely on fixed policies or predefined differential privacy budgets, limiting their ability to adapt to variations in reliability, data sensitivity, and request purpose. As a result, prosumers rarely receive explanations for why a request is accepted, rejected, or modified, reducing trust and participation. To address these limitations, we propose X-NegoBox, an explainable negotiation framework for adaptive privacy budgeting and transparent decision making. Each prosumer data is managed locally within a private DataBox, where raw data remain confined. Incoming requests are processed by an Autonomous Privacy Budget Negotiation Protocol (APBNP), which determines an appropriate privacy budget based on trust, feature sensitivity, declared purpose, historical behavior, and risk-aware pricing. When needed, APBNP generates privacy-preserving counter-offers, such as reduced resolution or duration. An Explainable Agreement Layer (X-Contract) produces human- and machine-readable justifications for each decision. After agreement, requester code executes locally in a sandbox, and only sanitized outputs are shared. Experiments on realistic energy market settings show reduced privacy leakage, higher acceptance rates, and improved interpretability.

Problem

• privacy budget
• peer-to-peer energy trading
• data sharing
• explainability
• differential privacy

Innovation

• Explainable AI
• Privacy Budget Negotiation
• Differential Privacy
• Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading
• DataBox