Interoperability Framework for Data Exchange between Legacy and Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Abstract

Performance of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is improving due to the introduction of International Electrotechnical Commission's (IEC) 61850 standard based smart meters and Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs).  Whereas, legacy metering infrastructure and devices can not be ignored due to their wide spread use and substantial capital investment, but at the same time advance technology based smart meters are forcing utilities to adopt new technology in metering.  Middle path, before complete transformation takes place, seems to be to make legacy and AMI interoperable. This paper proposes a solution where applications from different manufacturers can access a standard interoperable metered data. A novel solution is also provided for accessing the meter metadata without manually inputting the address parameters of a particular meter to reduce the development time involved in deploying the AMI head-ends.

Keywords: AMI, AMI Head-end, IEC 61850, Interoperability, Metadata, Smart Grid, XML Database