Reliance Infrastructure : Automated Meter Reading

A unique meter reading solution that uses CDMA technology to gather information from customer premises remotely and stores it in a central repository

Monday, June 01, 2009

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Reliance Infrastructure distributes more than 28 billion units of electricity to cover 25 million consumers across different parts of the country including Mumbai and Delhi in an area that spans over 1, 24,300 sq. kms. This makes it difficult to monitor and control the various parameters of an electricity network. Associated with such a large spread are problems like theft of electricity, tampering of meters, labour intensive jobs, etc. Hence, the CDMA supported AMR solution based on Packet based communication was deployed. It uses CDMA based modem communication. The modems are installed at the customer premises and the installation details are captured. The modems installed are then verified through a remote software to check the connectivity with the remote server. All the meter data is transmitted in suitably sized blocks called packets.

The packets are then transmitted on a shared network which routes each packet independently from all others and allocates transmission resources as needed. The meter data in encrypted and then transmitted to the remote server. The data can be decrypted only by using the meter software, and as a result data integrity is maintained. The AMR is integrated with the existing technologies deployed with Reliance Infrastructure like SAP to provide an end to end solution. Benefits after deployment: Optimum utilization of manpower; reduced carbon emission; improved customer service; better load forecasting and load management; and reduction in commercial and technical losses. The meter reading cycle time is maintained as 30 days in a sustainable manner – month after month. The accuracy of these meter readings is maintained to over 99.7%.

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