Private and Secure Coordination of Match-Making for Heavy-Duty Vehicle Platooning
This addresses privacy and security concerns for fleet owners in collaborative logistics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing encryption techniques for a specific application.
The paper tackles the problem of coordinating heavy-duty vehicle platooning by developing a secure and private framework for inter-agent communication, where fleet owners can submit encrypted queries and receive responses without revealing query content, with results showing that an agent can extract at most the answer to two queries per submission.
A secure and private framework for inter-agent communication and coordination is developed. This allows an agent, in our case a fleet owner, to ask questions or submit queries in an encrypted fashion using semi-homomorphic encryption. The submitted query can be about the interest of the other fleet owners for using a road at a specific time of the day, for instance, for the purpose of collaborative vehicle platooning. The other agents can then provide appropriate responses without knowing the content of the questions or the queries. Strong privacy and security guarantees are provided for the agent who is submitting the queries. It is also shown that the amount of the information that this agent can extract from the other agent is bounded. In fact, with submitting one query, a sophisticated agent can at most extract the answer to two queries. This secure communication platform is used subsequently to develop a distributed coordination mechanisms among fleet owners.