Smart water meter for automatic meter reading

Clean water is one of the main sectors in smart city that need well management. One of the clean water management is utilization of water meters. The smart meter is more suitable applied for smart city. Recent Smart Water Meter allows water authorities to obtain water consumption data remotely. It also provides ability to collect and record the data in real time that can be utilised for multipurpose. However, in Indonesia, the water meters are used only to measure the total volume of clean water consumption for billing purpose only using mechanical water meter and requires labour intensive manual. Currently, many researches on smart meter design have been developed. However, the smart meter only measure and record the water consumption, without ability in which customer can determine the amount of water as needed. This paper describes design and development of smart water metering with Internet of Things. Flow meter is used as a sensor of water flowing through the pipe. The ability of the proposed smart meter is not only to measure and to record the volume water consumed, but also the customer can determine the water desired and required. The volume of water measured by the smart meter is compared with the manual measurement. The result shows that the water measured manually differs slightly from smart meter measurement using water flow sensor. The maximum difference, error, is 0.03 litres. The proposed smart meter has ability to close the main valve once the determined amount of water is reached.

Smart Metering and Pricing Policy in Smart Grids

Pricing policy is one of the tools allowing the involvement of customers in the balance between the supply and the demand in smart grids. The present chapter aims at presenting the smart metering action including the bidirectional measurement of energy for smart houses equipped with renewable energies as well as the way a smart meter communicates data at the required timing to and from the control center. A typical bill establishment explaining how the net billing is produced along with a discussion about different pricing policies that the utility may adopt to reduce the peak load demand is also presented. The work is concluded by a typical simulation of a smart city modeled in LABVIEW software.

A Remote Calibration Device Using Edge Intelligence

Power system facility calibration is a compulsory task that requires in-site operations. In this work, we propose a remote calibration device that incorporates edge intelligence so that the required calibration can be accomplished with little human intervention. Our device entails a wireless serial port module, a Bluetooth module, a video acquisition module, a text recognition module, and a message transmission module. First, the wireless serial port is used to communicate with edge node, the Bluetooth is used to search for nearby Bluetooth devices to obtain their state information and the video is used to monitor the calibration process in the calibration lab. Second, to improve the intelligence, we propose a smart meter reading method in our device that is based on artificial intelligence to obtain information about calibration meters. We use a mini camera to capture images of calibration meters, then we adopt the Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector (EAST) to complete text detection, finally we built the Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) to complete the recognition of the meter data. Finally, the message transmission module is used to transmit the recognized data to the database through Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). Our device solves the problem that some calibration meters cannot return information, thereby improving the remote calibration intelligence.