Device monitoring and device management for smart meters

The utility industries across the world are trying to address challenges such as energy conservation, greenhouse gas emission, demand response management, diversified energy generation and so on. The next generation grid referred to as “Smart Grid” and “Smart Metering” are expected to provide solution to majority of these challenges. Smart metering is simply a culmination of information and communication technologies with traditional utility components – which will deliver intelligent and automated, remote utility meter monitoring and management capabilities [1]. The two main components of Smart metering are, the smart meters and the communications network which will provide the two way communication capability between the utility suppliers and the consumers (Smart meters). The key aspect of smart metering network is its ability to manage events generated by end devices namely smart meters. An event is any notable condition that happens in the smart metering environment. These events must be reported to both the communication service provider and the utility supplier. An event in general could be a fault in the system such as a device failure or business event such as detection of a threshold condition, over or under voltage detection etc. Both system faults and business related events will occur frequently and it is important that both kinds of events are quickly detected and reported. A fault management system will provide a centralized event monitoring and management capabilities to the network service provider. Like any other larger scale communications network, a smart meter network will also be built with multi vendor devices and technology. Therefore it is essential to build an event monitoring system that is scalable and can support diverse network equipment. The objective of this dissertation is to propose a fault monitoring system model for smart meters.