Distributed Privacy-Preserving Optimization With Accumulated Noise in ADMM.

Privacy preservation for distributed optimization in multiagent systems has been widely concerned in recent years. In this article, the accumulated noise privacy-preserving alternating direction method of multipliers (ANPPM) algorithm is proposed to preserve the private information of each agent. The masked states of each agent are sent to its neighbors with a designed noise-adding mechanism, and an accumulated term is introduced to confuse the gradients at each iteration. With ANPPM, all the agents can achieve privacy preservation for the information of real states and subgradients. Moreover, the states of all the agents can be guaranteed to converge to the optimal solution. The convergence rate of is consistent with standard ADMM, hence no adverse effect is induced by the privacy-preserving mechanism. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed ANPPM algorithm.