IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2016 - 42

in addition, the utility can now send a command to the
meter to run a diagnostic, power itself off, or simply ping
it to validate an outage notification that has been received
from the meter or the customer. using the remote reading
and control capability, the utility and the customer can now
capture more data that is more accurate than ever before.
This data can then be mined to produce reports and analysis
of many different types of information.

Enrichment from Other Sources
in addition to the additional data that the smart meters can
provide, the automation that can now be achieved using
this data has increased. if a tamper or last gasp message is
received from the meter, the data can be integrated into messages that can be interpreted by an outage management system, an asset management system, a customer information
system, and many other systems within the utility.
additionally, utilities now have the ability to enable
demand-response systems that will enable them to offer
the customers reductions in tariffs and peak/off-peak cost
reductions. The additional usage information provides many
systems with the capability to analyze the customer base
information and provide additional ancillary services that
were not possible in the past.

Meter Deployment Operation and Control
numerous information exchanges are associated with the
deployment, configuration, maintenance, and control of
meters. many operations that previously required the dispatch of field service technicians can now be done remotely,
at least in certain situations. handheld in-field programming/troubleshooting devices that communicate with a
meter's onboard communication ports (e.g., infrared) must
typically be programmed from back-office systems; those
information exchanges also benefit from standardization.
meter deployment involves the initial configuration of the
meter itself, as well as the establishment of linkages between
the meter, the usage point where it is installed, the utility
customer, and the service agreement. Tracking the linkage
between the meter and its configuration load is an asset-management responsibility. The usage-point linkage conveys the
meter's physical location and therefore involves geospatial
information and distribution grid management. The customer and customer-agreement linkages may be directly to
the customer-information system or indirect through the systems mentioned above.
meter installation involves a visit to the premise, but
utilities can realize very significant savings by performing
post-installation operations remotely. Business and technical
considerations that factor into the decision whether a particular intervention can be done remotely include security
and the bandwidth and reliability of the communications network. meter reconfiguration may be triggered by a customer
changing to a different tariff or by changes to the communications network or the reprioritization of classes of meter
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events. Partial or full meter firmware updates fall into a similar category. meter manufacturers often supply proprietary
tools to perform these operations, such that the content of
the data objects is opaque; but even where this is the case,
it may be useful to standardize the data objects by purpose,
e.g., tariff descriptors, network routing tables, and licensing/
security parameters.
The use of meter events, sensor readings, and error records
to enable remote troubleshooting may indicate that remote
corrective actions are feasible, for example, corrections to
routing tables. The ability to perform meter control operations
remotely is a core promise of ami technology. This includes
remote connect/disconnect operations and direct load control,
as well as commands to configure and control premise area
network devices for which the meter acts as a communications
gateway. These commands may reflect the fine-grained runtime implementation of decisions made by energy-market or
distribution grid management systems, based upon locational
marginal pricing, distribution system congestion, and planned
or detected outages. it may be necessary to share such decisions in near-real time with utility partners such as regional
transmission organizations and consumer-program facilitators.

Differential/Incentive Tariffs
smart meters can be configured with schedules defining
time-of-use (Tou) tariffs or to report usage during declared
critical-peak periods (CPPs) in dedicated registers so that
such usage can be billed at a higher rate. They can also be
configured to support reverse-metering tariffs to measure
electrical energy fed back into the grid by distributed energy
sources such as photovoltaic panels. finally, smart meters
can be configured to operate as prepaid meters by sending
buckets of usage (possibly at different rates) corresponding
to payments received from consumers.
The Cim defines data representations for the exchange of
all of these types of data, thereby facilitating interoperability
between utilities, meters, other premise-located equipment,
and utility partners who provide consumers with timely
analyses of their energy consumption. much of the economic and environmental benefit of smart metering depends
upon the full exploitation of these kinds of capabilities.

The Integration Problem
There is a wide variety of systems deployed to meet the
needs of electric utilities, with many of those systems having
direct involvement with smart meters and the information
they produce. figure 1 provides a perspective of the integration problem. where there are a wide variety of protocols
and communication infrastructures used for field communications, a significant challenge has been to address information exchanges within and between enterprises and their
related applications. This is especially true as new opportunities to leverage smart meter data are identified.
The existence of a standard information model such as
the Cim significantly reduces the information exchange
january/february 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2016