AMI for Multi Utility Meters

A White Paper

Kalki Communication Technologies Limited

#147, 5th Main, HSR Layout, Sector 7
Bangalore 560102, India
E-mail: info@kalkitech.com
Phone: 91-80-4052 7900
Web: www.kalkitech.com

[This white-paper was accepted and presented at CPRI Smart Grid Workshop, August 3, 4 -2011
Please refer the below link for more details:
http://www.cpri.in/Smartgrid/.
This paper is a case study of the work Kalkitech undertook as an Automated Metering Infrastructure
(AMI) project in one of the Middle East Asian countries. This paper covers the various aspects central
system which mainly includes meter head end system and data management system. More
importantly this paper discusses the challenges and different solution designs for the field level
communication to meet the client requirements]

KEYWORDS
AMR, AMI, DLMS, DCU, Data Concentrator, Multi Utility Meter, Head End System, MDAS, MDMS

BACKGROUND
Our Client is an establishment formed under the Ministry of Energy and Electrical affairs of a Middle
East Asian Country. Despite having rich energy sources, the country has identified wastage and
misuse of energy, which would impose in compensable damages upon annual budget of the country,
increased polluted gas and CO2 emissions and inefficiency in the energy sector among various other
disadvantages. With awareness of the importance of this matter, the government has turned the move
towards optimizing energy utilization and promoting sound use of the country's resources, into a duty
for all those in responsible positions. To make the energy utilization rational as well as optimum, the
government began a widespread planning campaign and formed a dedicated organization.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

Technical loss due to improper and inefficient metering

Lack of advanced metering practices such as demand management, load pattern analysis for
better forecasting

High operational cost

Error due to manual reading

Security risks due to manual system

Inability to adapt to Distributed energy resources and energy retail market

Poor customer experience arising from manual meter reading and billing

Less customer participation in energy management

No scope for Home Area Network (HAN), and Multi Utility Metering

REQUIREMENT
In order to overcome the current limitations the client wanted to implement a fully functional Advanced
Metering Infrastructure for three thousand consumers. The primary objectives of the project include:

Automatic reading from electricity, gas and water meters from central system

Home Area Network (HAN)

Network management of Data concentrator and meters

Monitoring and configuration of field devices

On demand read/ write to meters from central system

Archiving and management of meter data

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Interfacing meter data base to various utility applications such as customer care and billing,
power quality analysis

CHALLENGES
Being said about the requirements, it is never so easy to implement all these requirements meeting
the cost and time constraints. The major challenges in while implementing this project are:

Multi uUtility Metering

The inclusion of Multi Utility Meters viz gas and water meters in the project throws up a few
challenges such as:
Power supply Multi Utility Meters other than electricity meters are power critical devices being
operated by a battery power supply. These meters are designed to operate in battery saving
(sleep) mode for most of the time. It would wake up every day for a few minutes to push the data
and then return to sleep.
Communication In addition to electricity meters, the AMI should be able to handle Multi Utility
Meters. This makes sure that additional capital is not required for communication of Multi Utility
Meters.

Security

AMI system is a very critical asset for utility and shall be protected from all sorts of security threats.
Threats include unauthorized access to network or systems to access utility/ consumer data modify/
tamper the data, damaging the network or systems.

Communication

Communication is the core of this whole AMI exercise and hence designing the communication
network identifying the communication technology used, communication interfaces, modems/
gateways, data concentrators is a crucial aspect of this project. The performance and cost
requirements also have to be factored while deciding the communication design. There are various
communication options available such as Low power RF/Zigbee, PLCC, GPRS, GSM, Serial
multidrop. Different communication technologies have their own pros and cons in terms of
performance and cost.

Alarms/ Events

Utility wants the system to handle any abnormal condition encountered in the meter or anywhere in
the network. Thus the field devices should have the capability to monitor alarms conditions, generate
alarms and log it for future reference. Devices such as data concentrator should have the ability to
detect its own alarm conditions and also generate alarms for meters depending on electrical/ network/
data conditions. The challenging aspect of alarm is the ability of all elements in the system to send/
receive alarm immediately in unsolicited manner and process it.

Network Management

The new AMI shall also be capable of managing the network by monitoring the status of various
devices, logging and reporting the device status, discovery and registration of new devices. The
system should be automated to the best possible level to ease manual effort for installing new
devices.

Configuration

Configuration refers to configuring the field devices such as data concentrator and meters for various
schedules, communication settings in data concentrator and tarification, billing dates, resets. Central
system should be able to perform the configuration on demand and without affecting the normal
periodic reading.
The challenging part in configuration is to optimize the communication in order to save cost and time.
Configuration includes changing the tariff tables or upgrading meter firmware. These data would be
very large and can have size in the range of hundreds of Kilobytes (KB). Traditional configuration by
sending the data to each meter individually will exhort heavy load on the communication network and
affect performance of the overall system.
3

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Connect/ disconnect

Utility shall be able to connect or disconnect the meter for various purposes such as billing or load
limiting. These commands arising from utility legacy system shall be sent to appropriate meter without
affecting the scheduled automatic meter reading.

Manual data feed

The utility central data collection system shall be able to accept data manually. This will be particularly
useful when the communication network fails.

Interfacing to utility legacy systems

The utility have various legacy applications running in central system which handles the meter data
such as billing, power quality analysis. The data acquisition/ management system shall support
standards based integration with legacy systems.
The large scale and geographical spread of this project has several challenges such as:
Implementing HAN Communication with Multi Utility Meters
Security of communication networks
Economical and Technically suitable communication media for private network (DCU to meter)
Secure and cost optimized communication design for public network (DCU to Central system)

SOLUTION
The solution offered by Kalkitech includes:
Multi Utility Meters (electricity, gas, water)
Communication Module
Data Concentrator Unit
Meter Data Acquisition System
Meter Data Management System
The electricity meter supports the following functionalities:
Instantaneous parameters
Load, billing profiles
Event logs
Configurable Tarification Tables
Connect/ Disconnect
Events and Alarms
Firmware upgrade
Serial communication interface
The Communication module is a small add on module hot-pluggable to energy meter without
necessitating meter power off. This module is capable of establishing communication with Multi Utility
Meters and transfers the data to upstream system for further storage or processing. Communication
module will be connected with electricity meter through serial interface and with Multi Utility Meters
using MBus wireless. The module is designed to accept and store the data from gas and water
meters collected either by Push or Pull (periodically) mode.
The Data Concentrator Unit (DCU) will be installed in each apartment or for around twenty
independent houses. DCU application is running on a Linux powered ARM9 processor with
expandable memory to allow scaling up. The DCU comes with various communication interfaces such
as RF, Serial (RS232/485), GPRS and Ethernet. User can configure DCU with all necessary meter,
data, communication and schedule information. The configuration is saved as XML file which allows

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configuring either locally or remotely via web server. In addition to the communication protocol driver,
DCU also runs various other stacks/ applications such as TCP/ IP, FTP, Webserver, SNMP, SNTP.
The SNMP in DCU allows efficient network monitoring and allows any SNMP client to access the
network status information. DCU will also receive alarms/ events sent by meter and logged the same
into its non-volatile memory. DCU allows user to create various schedules for periodic meter data
reading from Multi Utility Meter. The private network between DCU and meters are based on wireless
low power RF which is relatively easy to deploy and does not have the operational cost. Data
collected periodically from meter is stored in DCU data base and later served to the central system
data acquisition software via GPRS network. The protocol used in both downstream and upstream
communication is DLMS/ COSEM which is the most popular metering protocol and allows modelling
of all metering/ DCU functionalities. DCU models each meter as a logical device within its DLMS
server. This allows communication optimization during configuration and firmware upgrade by central
system writing just one configuration file to DCU and about the various individual meters to be
configured.
Meter Data Acquisition System (MDAS) includes two major components, Metering Head End System
and Meter Data Management System. Metering Head End System is a combination of software and
hardware for collecting data from huge number of meters/ data concentrators installed in the field
through GPRS network. In addition to periodic meter data collection, head end system is also
responsible of network management and receiving alarms/ notifications from field devices. Head end
system would write the data into a RDBMS system for archiving and use for other modules such as
MDMS. Meter Data Management System is an application software which provides long term storage
and management which includes the data validation, reporting, notification. The data acquisition
system is SOA based which allows various SOA clients to access the data for their application.
Provided the nature of project, enough measures are taken to secure the data and systems from
intended or unintended security threats. The private communication network between meter and DCU
is secured using AES 128 encryption in addition to the access control mechanisms of DLMS protocol.
The public communication network between DCU and central system is secured using SSL based
VPN which almost entirely eliminate the risk of intrusion to the network. DLMS based encryption and
access control mechanisms will also be used in public network communication. Provided the level of
importance, remote DCU configuration is additionally secured using user management and NERC/
CIP.

CONCLUSION
This project is a classic case of AMI pilot project evaluating various technologies and topologies in a
futuristic way. The major deign factors for AMI should be provision for future scalability options,
operational cost and security. It should be made a practice to use interoperable systems based on
open standards.

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