Fighting apparent losses in metering systems through combination of meter abstraction and digital object architecture

Abstract

The physical boundary between customers and a utility company which is in charge of serving some of its products like water, electricity, gas, oil, etc. to its customers is a meter. Across the world, when utility companies that supply for instance water are tackling apparent losses that include meter thefts, they may know the cause of meter failures or meter replacements based on available data collected. However, when it comes to meter information persistence, a feature for meter theft prevention, utility companies and regulatory institutions lack the right means. In this paper, we expose a new way of understanding a meter in any metering system, i.e., Meter Abstraction in which we establish the difference between a meter entity, meter state entity and a point of connection entity. With the help of Meter Abstraction and Digital Object Architecture (DOA), we design and generate a single resolvable token and persistent metadata for each state across the life cycle of a meter. The result is a Meter State Validation Algorithm (MSVA) for meter states and meter reading validation regardless a metering system.