Weekly Brief

How a Water Meter Data Management System can Benefit You

Utilities Tech Outlook | Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Metering became the only method for the water companies to generate enough income to expand and repair or replace its water infrastructure as more and more people connected their homes and businesses to that water source.

FREMONT, CA: A meter data management system (MDMS) receives and saves meter data from a head-end system and transforms it into information that may be used by other utility applications, like billing, customer information systems, and outage management.

This system is based on the MDC system, whose principal role is the validation, estimation, and editing (VEE) of meter data that are then transmitted to utility systems, despite the possibility of disruptions in meter data flows.

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An MDMS is required to manage the vast amounts of data generated by automated or advanced metering equipment. It allows for the loose connectivity of systems. Multiple automated meter reading (AMR) systems provide their data through their separate head-end servers for the VEE procedure to fill data gaps, resulting in clean, integrated, and bill-ready data sets. MDMS delivers data to other utility systems, such as a data warehouse, outage management, and billing, for their respective functions. Gas, electric, and water meters are AMR/AMI systems supplying meter data to MDMS. Unlike typical grid systems, MDMS allows the consumer/customer to examine all their consumption data inside a single structure, with the capacity to manage both analog and interval data to optimize usage and expenses.

Despite its defining function as a data source, the MDMS serves numerous purposes within the greater IT ecosystem. It can function as a traffic director, data repository, data-framing engine, infrastructure map, and asset management system.

Traffic director: In this capacity, the MDMS can dynamically connect back-end applications to specific AMR/AMI systems, making data access simple and transparent for users.

Data repository: In this capacity, MDMS can act as a middleman between the back-end applications that request meter information and the particular AMR/AMI systems that collect the data. MDMS is primarily an online transaction processing system but can also serve as a temporary data repository.

Data framing engine: With this capacity, MDMS can assign interval usage data to particular billing determinants, enabling the invoicing of complex rates. This is useful when clients are eligible for specific incentives, such as time-of-day or peak day pricing rates in which the price fluctuates exponentially.

Infrastructure map: MDMS can store a specific virtual map of the electric infrastructure components and their linkages in this capacity. Among these components are meters, transformers, distribution circuits, and substations. As a connectivity model, this map is used to transmit information such as outage alarms to outage management systems and other notifications to their appropriate systems.

Asset management system: In this capacity, the infrastructure map that MDMS already possesses can be supplemented with asset data to serve as an asset management system, which can be helpful for small-scale utility businesses that may not be able to afford a separate asset management system.

In the constantly evolving smart grid industry, MDMS can play various roles. However, it is essential to highlight a few implementation problems, including data synchronization, system integration, scalability, system configuration, and time synchronization, all related to the huge volume of data that travels through the MDM system. Once the volume of data achieves a proper operating balance within the MDMS, these obstacles should become obsolete.

The MDMS is intended to enable effective integration with simplified infrastructure that can readily accommodate any modification to its multiple components without harming the system. In the global energy market, rising consumer demand and the emergence of prosumers are driving an increase in the deployment of smart grids, which require functional and sustainable components to meet these demands and stimulate market expansion.

Other reasons, including the integration of AMI systems with cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as extensive research and development, will propel the worldwide MDMS market beyond expectations.

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