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This study endeavored to enhance the efficiency and utility of microcomputer meters. In the past, their role was predominantly confined to remote meter reading, entailing high construction and communication transmission costs, coupled with subsequent maintenance and operational expenditures. These factors collectively impacted the enthusiasm of various stakeholders to invest in this realm. Hence, in alignment with the smart city development initiative, the natural gas industry has pioneered the establishment of an advanced metering infrastructure with heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) at its core. This visionary leap incorporates global machine-to-machine connectivity (G-M2MC) technology, interconnecting all facets of its operations, thereby positioning itself as a trailblazer within the industry. While advancing this endeavor, the project's scheduling aligns with the enterprise's sustainability goals in the early stages of digital transformation. This strategic allocation of resources is responsive to government policies and aspires to cultivate a digitally connected smart green energy hub, thereby expediting the transformation of the living environment. The objective is to provide a stable, secure, cost-effective, and reliable system that can be shared among peers. Furthermore, this study delved into the analysis of congestion avoidance in intelligent Zigbee satellite transport networks based on the HWSNs-GM2MC of non-synchronous satellite orbit system (NGSO) pivotal technologies, utilizing them to integrate the smart LNGas management system (SGMS). Concurrently, it developed application services through the smart meter application interface (SMAPI), distinct from conventional microcomputer meters. However, it is imperative to acknowledge that cloud computing, while processing sensitive data, grapples with issues of latency, privacy, efficiency, power consumption, and zero-trust security risk information management and ethical authority management capabilities in the defense of disaster relief responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data aggregation is considered as the crucial aspect of the smart grid to assess the electricity consumption information which acts as a basis of management decision making for utility provider. However, smart meters are lightweight devices therefore, subject to technical crashes and deferment in forwarding their data that hinders the efficient and accurate communication of data. Consequently, the consumption data of the faulty smart meters remain uncommunicated which can affect the accuracy of the final aggregate significantly and can misguide the utility companies in the power management decisions. Therefore, considering the stated challenge, a novel AI-driven fault-tolerant aggregation model is proposed that is established on the prediction mechanism of artificial neural network. The novelty of the proposed work lies in the efficient fault-handling of unavailability of data by utilizing previous available information. Furthermore, the proposed model also provides mechanism to track the affected meters and acknowledge the utility provider. The experimental simulation and comparison results reveal the outperforming results of the proposed model from state-of-the-art works which is validated using root mean squared error and mean absolute error. Additionally, the aggregation accuracy is achieved up to 99.95% with a relative improvement of 23.92%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The net benefits and public acceptance of a proposed reform to the current subsidization of energy in the State of Kuwait were investigated in this study. The proposed subsidization suggests that the government pays the consumers the subsidization cost in advance and in exchange for raising the subsidized tariffs to total price. The consumption will likely be reduced by a rate equal to the over-consumption due to the current subsidized tariffs relative to the income. The net benefits are expected to be maximized and shifted to a pseudo-equilibrium point where both the governments and the consumers will be better off financially. The public acceptance of the proposed strategy was examined using 274 voluntarily one-to-one interviews for gasoline and 121 for electricity and water. Also, a utility meters reading program was conducted on 90 houses out of the 121 interviews for utilities. The interviews for gasoline and utilities indicated 57% and 66% of the respondents see no equity in the current subsidization, 55%, and 80% admitted to overuse, 11% and 21% average of the consumption, and 67% and 66% of the respondents were willing to adopt the new strategy. The consumer is expected to save 912 USD/year from gasoline and 8,198 USD/year from utilities. The estimated net benefits are 5,841 million USD annually, with 62% attributed to utility benefits and 38% to gasoline benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conformity assessment of utility meters is the process by which compliance of measuring instruments with essential requirements is determined. The uncertainties associated with accuracy measurements during testing shall be evaluated and accounted for when making decisions about conformity with the specifications. This paper describes evaluation methods of measurement results in utility meters testing applicable for conformity assessment and for testing laboratories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current vision of internet of things aims at connecting anything with everything. It is estimated that there will be 18 billion connected devices in 2022. Applications like utility meters, robotics, smart street lighting, process automation, solar and wind farms are expected to grow. High end requirements for automated driving, industrial automation and e-health exist. Cellular IOT is expected to bring new use cases to address latest requirements in the market. There is a need to provide large coverage in a power efficient manner while providing a high battery life. There is a need to have a kit which connects seamlessly and has a small form factor. The requirements on latency and throughput are relaxed in some cases while stringent in others. Stringent requirements make use of more radio resources. There is increased demand for system capacity and network availability. In this paper we make use of nRF9160 kit a low-cost device where a reduction in the cost and complexity has been achieved. The performance objectives of coverage, throughput, latency, capacity, power efficiency and complexity are met. This kit provides a reliable and future proof solution in the long term. The kit is built for the global market and allows roaming over multiple networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future demands for Smart Meters (SM) applications impose maximizing resources utilization. In this paper, we achieve two main objectives to comply with fifth-generation networks goals and serving the SM applications. First one is to enhance the Narrowband-Internet-of-Things spectral efficiency. The second is to alleviate the signalling burden during each transmission request for SMs. First, we model the uplink scheduler for the NB-IoT access network using the state-machine modelling methodology on the Simulink environment. The simulation results are verified and validated with trusted modelling technique. Second, we optimize the NB-IoT uplink scheduler, which exploits the periodicity nature of SMs applications. We achieve that by proposing an integrated scheduling protocol which rearranges the transmission times of different smart meters utilities, and it draws a map for the transmission schedule of them to better utilize the sparse time resources. The proposed approach comprises architecture, signalling, and algorithms. We evaluate the optimization in term of numbers of SMs versus four performance indicators; resources utilization, spectral efficiency, setup success percentage, and session drop rate according to a case study. The simulation results prove the ability of our proposal to increase the spectrum utilization to 17.47%. This enhancement reflects on spectral efficiency that improved doubled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the close-enough traveling salesman problem, a variant of the Euclidean traveling salesman problem, in which the traveler visits a node if it passes through the neighborhood set of that node. We apply an effective strategy to discretize the neighborhoods of the nodes and the carousel greedy algorithm to appropriately select the neighborhoods that, step by step, are added to the partial solution until a feasible solution is generated. Our heuristic, based on these ingredients, is able to compute tight upper and lower bounds on the optimal solution relatively quickly. The computational results, carried out on benchmark instances, show that our heuristic often finds the optimal solution, on the instances where it is known, and in general, the upper bounds are more accurate than those from other algorithms available in the literature. Summary of Contribution: In this paper, we focus on the close-enough traveling salesman problem. This is a problem that has attracted research attention over the last 10 years; it has numerous real-world applications. For instance, consider the task of meter reading for utility companies. Homes and businesses have meters that measure the usage of gas, water, and electricity. Each meter transmits signals that can be read by a meter reader vehicle via radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology if the distance between the meter and the reader is less than r units. Each meter plays the role of a target point and the neighborhood is a disc of radius r centered at each target point. Now, suppose the meter reader vehicle is a drone and the goal is to visit each disc while minimizing the amount of energy expended by the drone. To solve this problem, we develop a metaheuristic approach, called (lb/ub)Alg, which computes both upper and lower bounds on the optimal solution value. This metaheuristic uses an innovative discretization scheme and the Carousel Greedy algorithm to obtain high-quality solutions. On benchmark instances where the optimal solution is known, (lb/ub)Alg obtains this solution 83% of the time. Over the remaining 17% of these instances, the deviation from the optimality is 0.05%, on average. On the instances with the highest overlap ratio, (lb/ub)Alg does especially well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the degradation rates of water meters assists utilities in making informed management decisions regarding meter replacement programmes and meter technology selection. This research evaluated the performance of 200 residential meters of two different technologies commonly used in Gauteng, South Africa, namely velocity meters and volumetric meters. This was done by conducting empirical meter testing in a verification laboratory and evaluating the degradation accuracy of each meter technology based on age and volume. Results indicate that velocity meters experience an accuracy degradation rate of approximately -1.13% per 1 000 kL of volume passed through the meter and an inferred initial error of -10.80%. Meter accuracy was not strongly related to age of the velocity meters tested. Volumetric meters did not exhibit a strong link with either age or accumulated volume, indicated by a loose grouping of results. These results indicate that accumulated volume of a velocity meter is a more reliable predictor of accuracy than age, and should be used when planning replacement strategies for velocity meters. Additionally, the lack of predictable degradation rates related to either age or accumulated volume for volumetric meters indicates that the accuracy of volumetric meters is primarily affected by other external factors, such as particulates or entrained air in the water network. These findings will assist utility managers in predicting the accuracy of their meter fleet and in making informed decisions regarding meter replacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the effective way of getting images from the information board of the counting register for utility metering. This method is based on the use of the open source library OpenCV. The image processing algorithm has been represented. The method of calibration of the video camera allows us to reduceerror probability in text recognition. Here are some results of the experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Smart cities are racing to create a more connected Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that rely on collecting data from every possible sensor such as a smart utility meter or a smart parking meter. The use of more sensors resulted in generating a lot of information that maps the smart city environment conditions to more real time data points that needed to be shared and analyzed among smart city nodes. One possibility, to carry and share the collected data, is in autonomous vehicles systems, which use the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) technology. For example, in a Car-to-Parking-Meter or a Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, short-range embedded sensors such as Bluetooth, Cameras, Lidar send the collected data to the vehicle's Electronic Control Unit (ECU) or to a road side gateway for making collaborative decisions and react to the environment's surrounding conditions. The goal of this research is to develop and test a DSRC based sensor-pooling protocol for vehicles to cooperatively communicate inclement weather or environment conditions. Five simulation experiments are setup using PreScan and Simulink to validate and study the scalability of the proposed solution. PreScan is an automotive simulation platform that is used for developing and testing Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS). The research findings proved that the DSRC can be used to effectively stream the short range sensors' collected data over a long distance communications link. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To promote energy saving in the residential sector Directive 2012/27/EU has set the obligation for buildings supplied by central heating sources to install individual heat metering and accounting systems. However, in social housing, bills based exclusively on individual consumption should be unfair due to some unfavourable situations, such as first and top floors, presence of unheated common spaces, north oriented dwellings. Nevertheless, fair heat accounting rules should be introduced especially in social housing buildings, which are often thermally underperforming with inefficient heating plants and tenants are commonly low-income people and elderly. On the other hand, common regulations for heat accounting providing compensation to avoid inequalities among tenants have not been set and different approaches on this topic are present among EU Member States. In this paper the authors present a new heat accounting method for social housing based on the estimation of extra-consumptions due to building inefficiencies. According to this method, extra-consumptions are charged to all tenants in order to encourage energy efficient retrofit interventions. Finally, the new method has been experimented in a typical social housing building in Italy and compared to other methods applicable in EU, evidencing some advantages and weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced metering technologies coupled with informatics creates an opportunity to form digital multi-utility service providers. These providers will be able to concurrently collect a customers’ medium-high resolution water, electricity and gas demand data and provide user-friendly platforms to feed this information back to customers and supply/distribution utility organisations. Providers that can install low-cost integrative systems will reap the benefits of derived operational synergies and access to mass markets not bounded by historical city, state or country limits. This paper provides a vision of the required transformative process and features of an integrated multi-utility service provider covering the system architecture, opportunities and benefits, impediments and strategies, and business opportunities. The heart of the paper is focused on demonstrating data modelling processes and informatics opportunities for contemporaneously collected demand data, through illustrative examples and four informative water-energy nexus case studies. Finally, the paper provides an overview of the transformative R&D priorities to realise the vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A low-cost mini tubular microbial fuel cell (MFC) was developed for treating groundwater that contained benzene in monitoring wells. Experimental results indicate that increasing the length and density, and reducing the size of the char particles in the anode effectively reduced the internal resistance. Additionally, a thinner polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) hydrogel separator and PVA with a higher molecular weight improved electricity generation. The optimal parameters for the MFC were an anode density of 1.22 g cm −3 , a coke of 150 μm, an anode length of 6 cm, a PVA of 105,600 g mol −1 , and a separator thickness of 1 cm. Results of continuous-flow experiments reveal that the increasing the sets of MFCs and connecting them in parallel markedly improved the degradation of benzene. More than 95% of benzene was removed and electricity of 38 mW m −2 was generated. The MFC ran continuously up to 120 days without maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern power systems are experiencing the challenge of high uncertainty with the increasing penetration of renewable energy resources and the electrification of heating systems. In this paradigm shift, understanding electricity users' demand is of utmost value to the retailers, aggregators, and policymakers. However, behind-the-meter (BTM) equipment and appliances at the household level are unknown to the other stakeholders mainly due to privacy concerns and tight regulations. In this paper, we seek to identify residential consumers based on their BTM equipment, mainly rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems and electric heating, using imported/purchased energy data from utility meters. To solve this problem with an interpretable, fast, secure, and maintainable solution, we propose an integrated method called Interpretable Refined Motifs And binary Classification (IRMAC). The proposed method comprises a novel shape-based pattern extraction technique, called Refined Motif (RM) discovery, and a single-neuron classifier. The first part extracts a sub-pattern from the long time series considering the frequency of occurrences, average dissimilarity, and time dynamics while emphasising specific times with annotated distances. The second part identifies users' types with linear complexity while preserving the transparency of the algorithms. With the real data from Australia and Denmark, the proposed method is tested and verified in identifying PV owners and electrical heating system users. The performance of the IRMAC is studied and compared with various state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method reached an accuracy of 96% in identifying rooftop PV users and 94.4% in identifying electric heating users, which is comparable to the best solution based on deep learning, while the speed of the inference model is a thousand times faster. Last but not least, the proposed method is a transparent algorithm, which can tackle the concerns regarding the agnostic decision-making process when policies prohibit some machine learning methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volumetric water metering is a critical need for rationalizing abiana (water tariff) rates in the Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS). Measuring water flows in a mogha (small irrigation outlets) is extremely challenging due to various problems of scale. Due to the extremely large number of such outlets in IBIS (numbering tens of thousands), a manual measurement and reporting system is completely infeasible. An ICT powered automation is an obvious approach towards solving this scalability problem. However, the challenges for an electronic solution are enormously high. While such an automation has been successfully demonstrated for distributary irrigation canals (10s-100s of cusecs) in the IBIS by our group using a smart water metering approach, measuring such flows at the outlet level (<3 cusecs) is hampered by challenges in hydraulics, frequent siltation, unavailability of grid energy to power electronics, unreliable telecommunications backbone and institutional support to service the meters. In this paper, we report our development and deployment of a test unit for discharge measurement on an outlet using a Low Power Wireless Smart Water Meter, and a long throated flume to generate a modular flow of water to measure discharge in small rectangular channels and to analyse the accuracy of measurement of unit. The deployed solution can be used to remotely transmit depth of water, discharge, state of channel, therefore, free flow or submerged using GSM/GPRS module. Two ultrasonic sensors take reading of depth of water in channel, one on the approach section h 1 and another on tail water section h 2 for estimation of state of flume. Rating curve of the discharge measurement unit is generated by WinFlume and results of real system discharge measurements are compared for accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional utility meters are increasingly being replaced with smart meters as Advanced Metering Infrastructures (AMIs) provide many benefits over conventional power infrastructures. However, security issues pertaining to data transmission between smart meters and utility servers are a major concern. In particular, as data travels through several networks, scalable key management schemes are crucial for secure end-to-end communications. In this paper, we propose an approach based on physically unclonable function (PUF) technology for providing strong hardware based authentication of smart meters and efficient key management to assure the confidentiality and integrity of messages exchanged in AMIs. Our approach does not require modifications to the existing smart meter communication. We have developed a proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed approach which is also briefly discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work describes a methodology for informing targeted demand-response (DR) and marketing programs that focus on the temperature-sensitive part of residential electricity demand. Our methodology uses data that is becoming readily available at utility companies—hourly energy consumption readings collected from “smart” electricity meters, as well as hourly temperature readings. To decompose individual consumption into a thermal-sensitive part and a base load (non-thermally-sensitive), we propose a model of temperature response that is based on thermal regimes, i.e., unobserved decisions of consumers to use their heating or cooling appliances. We use this model to extract useful benchmarks that compose thermal profiles of individual users, i.e., terse characterizations of the statistics of these users' temperature-sensitive consumption. We present example profiles generated using our model on real consumers, and show its performance on a large sample of residential users. This knowledge may, in turn, inform the DR program by allowing scarce operational and marketing budgets to be spent on the right users—those whose influencing will yield highest energy reductions—at the right time. We show that such segmentation and targeting of users may offer savings exceeding 100% of a random strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article deals with smart metering utility and connectivity services based on the summary of a "Connected Objects" report of the IDATE Research Programme. Topics discussed include the technological composition of communication for smart meters, the deployment of regulated smart metering technologies, and revenue forecast for smart metering connectivity for electricity, gas and water.

The so-called death spiral is not necessarily a result of disruptive competition from resources at the customer side of the meter, but from the inherent design of rate structures. This article highlights the value of the grid as a call option for consumers and suggests rate design as a cure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the managerial problem of estimating volumetric water sales for purposes of billing when consumption data are deficient and when a water utility operates in a heterogeneous urban environment characterized by diverse socioeconomic features. A dummy variable regression model was developed and used to assess how housing sector affects residential water consumption when the former is moderated by number of households and resident population for a customer account. Results show that spatial variation in residential water consumption exists and that both resident population and number of households are significant determinants. This implies that commercial managers of water utilities should consider service location when estimating average volumetric water sales for billing purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though many water utilities in the United States perform some form of water meter testing, little has been published concerning utility meter accuracy-testing procedures. Although AWWA's Manual M6, Water Meters-Selection, Installation, Testing, and Maintenance (2012), provides much useful information concerning accuracy-testing principles, the recent development of static residential water meters has introduced new questions about accuracy-testing procedures that are not addressed in the current edition of M6. This article discusses the results of a study performed at the Utah Water Research Laboratory (UWRL) that involved sending a set of meters to various utility meter shops around the country to be tested. The UWRL tested the meters both before and after the tests were performed at each utility. Each utility forwarded a copy of its accuracy test results to the UWRL, and the results from each utility were then compared with the UWRL test results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing electricity consumption in Irish milk production is a topical issue for 2 reasons. First, the introduction of a dynamic electricity pricing system, with peak and off-peak prices, will be a reality for 80% of electricity consumers by 2020. The proposed pricing schedule intends to discourage energy consumption during peak periods (i.e., when electricity demand on the national grid is high) and to incentivize energy consumption during off-peak periods. If farmers, for example, carry out their evening milking during the peak period, energy costs may increase, which would affect farm profitability. Second, electricity consumption is identified in contributing to about 25% of energy use along the life cycle of pasture-based milk. The objectives of this study, therefore, were to document electricity use per kilogram of milk sold and to identify strategies that reduce its overall use while maximizing its use in off-peak periods (currently from 0000 to 0900 h). We assessed, therefore, average daily and seasonal trends in electricity consumption on 22 Irish dairy farms, through detailed auditing of electricity-consuming processes. To determine the potential of identified strategies to save energy, we also assessed total energy use of Irish milk, which is the sum of the direct (i.e., energy use on farm) and indirect energy use (i.e., energy needed to produce farm inputs). On average, a total of 31.73 MJ was required to produce 1 kg of milk solids, of which 20% was direct and 80% was indirect energy use. Electricity accounted for 60% of the direct energy use, and mainly resulted from milk cooling (31%), water heating (23%), and milking (20%). Analysis of trends in electricity consumption revealed that 62% of daily electricity was used at peak periods. Electricity use on Irish dairy farms, therefore, is substantial and centered around milk harvesting. To improve the competitiveness of milk production in a dynamic electricity pricing environment, therefore, management changes and technologies are required that decouple energy use during milking processes from peak periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The value proposition for the installation of power factor (PF) correction (PFC) to avoid costly utility penalties is easily understood. The attractive payback of such PFC opportunities often pushes the project ahead without engineering considerations. In the case of medium-voltage PFC, lack of upfront engineering can lead to unexpected consequences in the performance of the PFC equipment ranging from nuisance trips and blown fuses to catastrophic failure in the extreme. In this paper, the authors propose a systematic approach to the design of PFC for medium-voltage systems. Three actual case studies were selected to illustrate this systematic approach and show that it can be applied regardless of the size, type, and complexity of the facility. Such a methodology is composed of load flow and harmonic measurements, harmonic analysis, utility billing demand and PF analysis, and reactive compensation specification in the form of either capacitors or harmonic filters, if needed. Diverse and competing design constraints, including daily and week load cycles, nearby utility capacitors, switched or stepped requirements, specifics of utility tariffs, loads with high harmonic content, and harmonic resonance, are identified, analyzed, and then incorporated into the solution to ensure successful performance of the PFC equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In water supply systems, a considerable amount of apparent loss is caused by meter under-registration. Water meters are subject to intrinsic systemic error depending on the actual flow rates passing through them. Furthermore, the moving parts of the meter are subject to wear and tear that progressively reduce meter accuracy. The increase in systemic error is especially evident at low flow rates because of growing friction in the rotating mechanism, which requires a higher flow to start the meter (starting flow). The aim of this paper is to experimentally investigate metering error in an attempt to find a direct link between meter age, network pressure and apparent losses caused by the in ability of the meter to accurately register the volume passing though it at low flow rates. The study was performed through laboratory experiments in which worn-out water meters were tested using a test bench. The results of the laboratory experiments show that ageing and pressure are both relevant parameters for determining meter starting flow. These results were then applied to assess the effects on apparent losses of the age of the meter, varying pressure values upstream of the meter (the pressure in the network where the meter is installed) and different patterns of flow rates passing through the device (the consumption pattern of the user). The presented results are useful for understanding the effects of operating conditions on water meter under-registration, which can aid water managers in implementing effective replacement campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on electrical grid of the U.S. and the problems in the research and development. It discusses the implementation of modern grid which is a secure and reliable decentralized system and the use of smart meter that helps consumers to monitor and control the electricity usage. It further focuses on the privacy threats as the data are highly revealing and the need of law enforcement. It also discusses case law, the Fourth Amendment and the U.S. Congress privacy legislations.

A model of decentralised metering decisions that applies to the water industry is developed. The social benefit of metering is higher the more sensitive demand is to the price. Allowing households to choose whether or not to have meters is efficient when only small households should have meters but does not work when the regulator does not know household characteristics and only larger households should have meters. The policy of requiring meters to be provided free, which has been adopted in England and Wales, is analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy efficiency programme monitoring is often based on ex-ante saving estimations. These estimations lack standardization, are prone to parameter errors, and neglect rebound effects. Moreover, a comparison with ex-post estimations is not systematically done. This paper proposes a simple methodology to assess ex-ante against ex-post estimations, using the distribution of the energy savings deficit, i.e. the normalized difference between reported and metered savings. This methodology is applied to a dataset of lighting renovation measures to first assess calculated savings against utility meter data. The mean energy savings deficit amounts to 39% for measures in small to medium enterprises and to 28% in common areas of buildings. Further analysis shows that this overestimation arises from both significant calculation errors and rebound effects. These analysis and findings are the first of their kind for these sectors. The methodology is further used to assess deemed savings approaches. The results show that coefficients based on time-of-use and the type of replaced technology provide a precision comparable to calculated savings. Further limitations of ex-ante quantitative monitoring are identified based on empirical observations of a utility-driven programme. This suggests that, instead of current practices, quantitative monitoring should focus on ex-post analysis of meter data. This would free up resources for a more qualitative follow-up of measure impacts to better inform programme and policy design. • Energy saving deficit distributions are used to assess saving estimation methods. • Rebound effects are significant in SMEs and common areas of buildings. • Deemed saving approaches can reach a precision comparable to calculated savings. • Deemed saving coefficients can provide a light standard for programme evaluation. • Quantitative evaluations ought to be complemented with qualitative approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, utility meters for water are tested for measurement behavior at stable operating conditions at specified flow rates as part of the approval process. The measurement error that occurs during start and stop or when changing between flow rates may not be taken into account. In addition, there are new technologies whose measuring behavior under real-world conditions is only known to a limited extend. To take these facts into account, a new method has been developed and tested to determine the measurement behavior of water meters under dynamic load profiles as they occur in the real application. For this purpose, a test rig for flow rate measurement was extended by a cavitation nozzle apparatus and the generation of dynamic load profiles was validated. For the cavitation nozzles used, possible factors influencing the flow rate, such as temperature and purity of the water as well as the upstream pressure were investigated. Using different types of domestic water meters, the applicability of the dynamic test procedure was demonstrated and the measurement behavior of the meters was characterised. • Influence of vapor pressure and upstream pressure on cavitating nozzle flow. • Generation of dynamic load profiles with cavitation nozzles on water flow test rigs. • Validation of dynamic test profiles with Coriolis and magnetic inductive flow meter. • Exemplary investigation of consumption water meters with dynamic test procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on new aspects of flow measurement errors in large-diameter pipes. It states that flowmeters are used to identify the volume of water that is transferred between various business entities. It is also mentioned that the performance of many types of flowmeters is determined by limitations of flowmeter technology, installation, operation, maintenance, and calibration. It is forwarded that for accurate operation most flowmeters call for a fully developed velocity profile that is free from swirl so that the flow is predictable and not distorted.

The article presents a commentary about the need to consider the crucial element of testing large water meters by water utility managers. It is said that large meters are usually neglected because they lose accuracy gradually. However, these meters can significantly affect a utility's financial health and unaccounted-for water ratios.

The subject of this paper is power-line communications over the European 240-V domestic low-voltage mains supply in the frequencies identified by the European mains signaling standard. Techniques apply to low-cost equipment for applications requiring data rates of no more than hundreds of bits per second. Only narrow-band modem techniques are considered. A previous paper presented a channel model and transmitter/receiver structure. In the present paper, the effectiveness of a well-known method of achieving symbol synchronization using a pseudonoise training sequence is shown. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In its efforts to provide automated meter-reading services to the utility industry, Schlumberger faces the problem of deploying receivers efficiently. In a geographic region, the problem is to install the minimum number of receivers on existing utility poles so that all wireless meters in that region can transmit their readings to at least one. Schlumberger first encountered this large-scale problem in a project it ran for Illinois Power. It found solving this problem manually very time consuming, and it had no ability to evaluate the robustness of the resulting solution. We proposed and implemented an optimization-based approach that reduced the duration and cost of implementations. In addition, we gave planners the ability to answer what--if questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the development of an intelligent information filter for automated metering systems. Prevention of false outage notifications in addition to improving the quality of outage data; Nature of wireless communication in automated meter reading systems that entails issues in the query process; Modeling of the uncertainty using probabilistic and fuzzy engineering techniques.

Addresses the potential applications of multi-protocol routing for Automatic Remote Meter Reading. Effect of customer infrastructures on the provision of a remote meter reading system; Data and communication network protocols; Transmission and receipt of data from any point on the Low Voltage Distribution Network (LVDN).

A one-to-one map between a specific demand structure and a restricted cross-elasticity matrix is developed and tested using a random utility model. The resulting demand structure can be used to evaluate a firm's ability to differentiate its products, and can help determine if demand is characterized by factors that are easy to change. Similar brands are assumed to share common attributes that are stochastically evaluated by the consumer, resulting in a random utility model with correlated errors. The map results in more precise cross-elasticity estimates and can be used to both identify and test possible structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most extensive treatment of depreciation by the U.S. courts has been in the field of public-utility rate regulation; but depreciation has also been considered in other types of cases, including: income tax cases, the determination of corporate income which can be distributed as dividends, the settlement of partnership agreements when the amount of income is in dispute, the life-tenant remainderman situations, master-and-servant cases when a part of the servant's compensation is a share of net income, patent cases when the royalty is a portion of net income, and eminent domain cases in the determination of the value of the confiscated property. In building up an interpretation of depreciation provisions over the years, the courts have proceeded much as the same way; that is, they have attempted to interpret the laws according to accepted practices and standards. Although there is an occasional cross citation, the cases on public-utility rate regulation, in which depredation is involved, seem to constitute a separate group, unrelated to income tax and other types of cases. In the opinion of the author there has been a definite trend in recent years toward the acceptance of complete, systematic depreciation accounting and the recognition of the inevitably close relationship which exists between the periodic allowance and the deduction made in rate-base valuations.

In this work, an implementation-friendly multiple-symbol detection (MSD) scheme is proposed for the IEEE 802.15.4g offset quadrature phase shift keying (O-QPSK) receivers over the slow fading channel. The full MSD scheme presents better detection performance than the symbol-by-symbol detection (SBSD) scheme, yet its complexity increases exponentially as the observation window length increases. We introduce a simplified MSD scheme based on two powerful strategies. We first seek the optimal and suboptimal decisions in each symbol position with the standard SBSD procedure. Then, the aforementioned optimal and suboptimal decisions instead of all candidates are jointly searched with the standard MSD procedure. That is, only the most and second most reliable candidates in each symbol position are selected to participate in the final detection. The simulation results demonstrate that the new MSD scheme can achieve more encouraging energy gain than the SBSD scheme, while the high complexity of full MSD is also effectively reduced. A more legitimate compromise between detection performance and complexity is thus accomplished, which enables smart metering utility networks (SUN) nodes to achieve energy saving and maximum service life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]