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Rampant power theft is a growing concern for power distribution companies as well as the country's economy at the low voltage consumer end. Power theft including theft of power, defective meters, or errors in billing has been an area of growing attention from researchers. Power theft affects the power supply efficiency, raises the demand on the generating station, and causes significant harm to the legitimate customers. This is a major problem in developing countries, and detecting and dealing with the people responsible for theft have been extremely troublesome for utility companies. This paper discusses the factors that influence power theft and pilferages. In this paper, we have given due diligence to the literature review on the methods for detecting power theft. Apparently in a huge democratic setup like India, none of the proposed methods have been very effective so far. There has been no respite from the rampant power thefts, which at times happens in a very organized manner by well-known establishments. There are many power distribution companies active in India. All these companies install energy meters in every house for the measurement of the power consumption. However, the consumers tamper and bypass these devices to connect unauthorized loads sometimes in cohort with the employees of these distribution companies. The change to centralized metering infrastructure for a huge number of consumers is not a feasible solution at all. Thus there is a need for designing alternate low-cost tamper free smart energy meter to detect and communicate the pilferage of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new condition-based preventive maintenance model for a system, subject to deterioration-failures and to random failures with increasing intensity, is presented. Deterioration is modeled as discrete stages. After an inspection, based on the degree of deterioration, a minimal maintenance or a major maintenance is performed, or no action is taken. Deterioration failures are restored by complete replacements; Random failures are restored by minimal repair. Major maintenance restores the system to `τ' deterioration stages younger (τ > 1), while minimal maintenance restores the system one stage. The proposed model considers an accumulated deterioration based increasing intensity for the random failures. A continuously increasing failure rate (for example Weibull) is converted into a stepwise increasing failure rate using stair-step approximation. An exact recursive algorithm computes the steady-state probabilities of the system. Based on maximization of the system availability or minimization of total cost, an optimal inspection policy within this strategy, optimal inter-inspection time, and threshold deterioration level for replacement, are obtained. The effects of threshold deterioration level for deterioration replacements, inspection, maintenance, and repair parameters are investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]