Cornice Engineering

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Meter Data Management (MDM) Feasibility Studies and Services

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) technology has seen rapid expansion in capability and deployment by utilities in recent years. The trend in recent years has been to use AMI systems to provide massively larger volumes of information and a greater variety of different types of information. Modern systems often provide readings on an hourly basis or more frequently. In addition, they collect a variety of information on outage status, numbers of temporary interruptions, service voltage, and other power quality information.

Increasingly, AMI systems are also being considered as playing a key role as a customer gateway technology in the various advanced interactive or smart grid efforts. Significant enhancement of the operational value of AMI is now available as a result of recent developments in the integration of AMI with other automation systems. For example, AMI, integrated with an outage analysis, improves outage handling and reduces outage duration. Demand response, for those utilities with demand charges or significant capacity restrictions can provide substantial economic benefits.

Meter data management (MDM) systems have developed to handle the increased data produced by AMI system and subsequently utilized by a variety of enterprise systems. Often MDM systems are a critical means to validate AMI data and to estimate missing or erroneous meter readings. MDM systems have the ability to become the central data repositories for utility information systems and thus proper implementation has become critical to the enterprise.

Cornice can provide the following services in relationship to AMI and MDM systems:

Establishing realistic goals for the AMI and/or MDM project.
Determining the likely costs of deployment of an AMI and/or MDM system.
Determining the qualitative benefits that might accrue from deployment and estimating the quantitative value of those benefits.
Specifying key interoperability goals between the AMI and/or MDM project and other enterprise software to maximize effectiveness and benefits of the AMI/MDM installation.
Determining new capability available to the utility as a result of deploying an AMI and/or MDM system.
Preparing comprehensive AMI and MDM feasibility and economic studies.
Determining the required and desired features of the AMI and/or MDM package.
Evaluating potential vendor offerings with respect to the client’s technical requirements, budgetary restrictions, and available communications options.

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