Energy & Utilities - Monitoring & Billing Management System - Document Management News

This client develops and sells a wide range of innovative products and services that enable organisations to reduce their energy consumption and cut their CO2 emissions and is at the leading edge of technology in developing powerful energy information systems used by major corporate energy users around the world.

With over 20 years of experience in the sector, Geoff Ballard was project leader for this same client in the development of powerful Monitoring and Targeting (M&T) software systems that allow organisations to collect and analyse half hourly data from utility meters, data loggers and building management systems, helping to drive down energy expenditure and reduce CO2 emission. This technology is used to deliver an automatic meter reading and data collection service that is available for electricity, gas and water - both for main and sub-meters, and for half hourly and non-half hourly sites.

The complexity and scale of a fully automated DC/DA (Data Collection and Data Aggregation) system is not to be underestimated. For example:

• The main readings database table contains more than 1.1 billion records, even after old records have been archived. The database code has been highly optimised to deal with large data volumes efficiently
• The number of different types of electronic message exchanged over the network used by the electricity industry for the Half Hourly Electricity alone is around 38, each of which can be received or send on any given day and each has to be processed automatically by the system
• With in-excess of 20,000 meters being read on a daily basis there are bound to be communication problems due to the reliability of cell phone connections and other issues. Providing alerting and management systems to keep track of these issues is a complex and essential part of the software

Information is made available to clients via a web interface, with reports and data delivery being customised to the precise requirements of the client. Automatic exception reporting, for example, alerts managers if the consumption figures for a site deviate from the expected profile, allowing appropriate steps to be taken. The same data is made available to energy suppliers, distributors and other industry participants for a variety of uses including billing and infrastructure monitoring.

The DC/DA clarity system has been developed in ASP.NET, C# and Oracle PL/SQL. The data collection and monitoring system is developed in Visual C++ and supports both Oracle and SQL Server databases.

To find out more about custom management systems developed on the Microsoft Application Platform, please email us or please call Daniel Jones on 01342 410223.

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