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Utilities Business Review | Friday, April 15, 2022
Metering became the only way for the water companies to develop enough income to raise, repair, or substitute their water infrastructure as, progressively, people connected their homes and businesses to that water source.
FREMONT, CA: A meter data management system (MDMS) acquires and saves meter data from a head-end system and converts it into information that may be utilized by other utility applications, like billing, customer information systems, and outage management.
This system follows the MDC system, whose main role is the validation, estimation, and editing (VEE) of meter data that are then shipped to utility systems, despite disruptions in meter data flows.
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An MDMS is necessary to manage the huge amounts of data caused by automated or advanced metering equipment. It permits the loose connectivity of systems. Numerous automated meter reading (AMR) systems deliver their data via their separate head-end servers for the VEE process to fill data gaps, causing clean, integrated, and bill-ready data sets. MDMS provides data to other utility systems, like a data warehouse, outage management, and billing, for their functions. Gas, electric, and water meters are AMR/AMI systems supplying meter data to MDMS. Unlike regular grid systems, MDMS lets the consumer/customer review all their consumption data inside a single structure, with the ability to manage analogue and interval data to improve usage and expenses.
Despite its defining function as a data source, the MDMS serves multiple purposes within the greater IT ecosystem. For instance, it can function as a traffic director, infrastructure map, data repository, data-framing engine, 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 power, MDMS can work as a middleman between the back-end applications that request meter information and the respective 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 designate interval usage data to separate billing determinants, allowing the invoicing of complex rates. This is helpful when clients are eligible for specific incentives, like time-of-day or peak-day pricing rates in which the price fluctuates rapidly.
Infrastructure map: MDMS can store a detailed virtual map of the electric infrastructure components and their linkages in this capacity. Among these components are meters, distribution circuits, transformers, and substations. As a connectivity model, this map is utilized to transmit information like outage alarms to outage management systems and other notifications to their relevant systems.
Asset management system: In this capacity, the infrastructure map that MDMS already owns can be supplemented with asset data to act as an asset management system, which can be useful for small-scale utility businesses that may not be able to afford a particular asset management system.
In the continually evolving smart grid industry, MDMS can play different roles. First, it is important to emphasize a few implementation problems, including data synchronization, scalability, system integration, system configuration, and time synchronization, all about the huge volume of data that travels through the MDM system. However, once the volume of data attains a proper operating balance within the MDMS, these obstacles should become obsolete.
The MDMS is designed to allow effective integration with simplified infrastructure that can easily accommodate any modification to its numerous components without harming the system. In the global energy market, increasing consumer demand and the emergence of prosumers are driving an increase in the deployment of smart grids, which need functional and sustainable components to meet these demands and enable market expansion.
Other reasons, including integrating AMI systems with cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), and extensive research and development, will drive the worldwide MDMS market beyond expectations.
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