Reliance Infrastructure : Automated Meter Reading

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%.