Advanced Meterring Infrastructure for Smart

S Grid
Applications
Chenthamarai Sellvam1, Kota Srinivas2, G.S. Ayyappan3, M. Venkaatachala Sarma4
Central Scientific Instruments Organisation
C
CSIR Madras Complex, Chennai, Tamilnadu, India.
1
chentha@csircmc.res.in
2
sriniwaskota@gmail.com
3
ayyappan1972@gmail.com
4
sarmafires@gmail.com

Abstract—The existing power grid may noot support future directional communication is implemented and it will most
growing electric demand. Advanced technologgies can be used to importantly include more nuumber of renewable and eco-
improve efficiencies and moderate electric usaage by avoiding the friendly sources of power generation.
need for new generation, transmission and disttribution plants. To
meet the needs of the future and to fix the problems of the past,
smart grid technology harnesses the mostt advanced digital
computing technologies to monitor and adjusst the usage. Smart
grid also aids in optimizing the amount of enerrgy generated. This
technology assures better usage of resources and
a accurate billing
to customers based on actual consumption rather than estimates.
Smart grid implementation demands developments in the
technologies like Advanced Metering Infrastructure, Two-Way
communications , Smart meters / Smart sensoors, Load control ,
interoperability, security, Information Technology,
T web
connectivity and Renewable Energy & Storaage Systems. This
paper details the Advanced Metering Infrastru ucture development
particularly the Power Quality Analysis. Thee paper also briefs
National scenario of Advanced Metering Infrrastructure to meet
smart grid applications and its development.
Keywords—AMI, smart meter, advanced meter,
m Smart Grid,
IEC 61850 Protocol, Power Quality Analyzer.
Figure 1 Technological development
d of Smart Grid
I. INTRODUCTION
Three major components of o smart Grid are smart meter,
The smart electric grid technology heelps to efficiently communication network annd data base management
manage the future power demand reducing the need to build techniques. Smart meter measures
m the basic electrical
new power plants. There is a need to exploore and understand parameters like phase voltage,, phase current, active, reactive
the International and National Scenario of Advanced
A Metering and apparent powers & enerrgies, power factors & power
Infrastructure and Smart Grid technologies. Essential features, quality parameters with time stamping and stores for future
specifications and technological developm ment of advanced retrieval and analysis. For a typical distribution substation
meter are thrust areas of research to conceivee a comprehensive serving N thousand customerrs, to collect hourly interval
and intelligent advanced metering infrastruucture which will meter reading from each smartt meter, requires the ability of a
play a vital role in the generation, distribution and communication network to trannsfer 24 * N *1000 data points
consumption part of smart grid. per hour to a central data base management
m system[6].

Fig.1 shows the technological developm ment of Smart Grid
from the conventional grid. In Conventionall electric grids we
have only one direction of communication from the Grid to
the Consumer. In Smart Grids we have two way
communications between the Utility and the Consumers. With
the help of the bi-directional communicationn the generation of
electricity can be made dynamic. In Smart S Grids with
Distributed resources a design of Grid whichh is smart with bi-
Reliable and standard coommunication is an important
feature in the Smart grid / Sm mart meter technologies. Smart
meters / advanced meterss must have capability to
communicate the information collected, to the computer for
reporting and analysis. The communication network which
transfers massive amount of information to the data
concentrator / data base manaagement system requires a high
degree of operational reliabilitty. The communication network
also serves as the control link or information link between the
operational command centre to different end devices for

ISBN: 978-1-4673-1601-9/12/$31.00 ©20122 IEEE 145 ICRTIT-2012

control or customer services display and alarm. These end
devices can be control switches for capacitor banks or load
control devices. Hence the communication system, by
implication, is basically a two-way communication system and
practically serves as a neural network of the system.
Another major component is the data stored in the data
concentrator / data base management system. The measured
data can be used for conventional customer billing and new
customer billing strategies such as time of use rates, pre-pay
metering etc. Customer access to information about how one
uses the electric energy imposes new requirements on how the
metering data is stored, its format and accessibility. To handle
demand response, energy consumption profiles are to be
maintained for demand reduction and energy conservation.
II. SMART GRID AND ADVANCED METERING
INFRASTRUCTURE
Smart grid is nothing but modernization of existing power
grid using advances in technology. It is digital automation of
electric power system from power generation to customer
appliance for the purpose of improving quality, reliability,
efficiency and environmental friendliness. Smart grid will
facilitate for active participation of consumers with timely
access and control to their energy usage. Consumers can bid
their energy resources at the electric market. Smart Grids
support power quality monitoring and diagnostic responding
to power quality deficiencies and reduces loss to customers
due to insufficient quality of power. Smart grid shall have the
capability to anticipate and respond to system disturbances by
continuous self assessment to take corrective action.
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the
major aspects of smart grid. It consists of advanced meters or
smart meters that monitor the power usage, communicate and
control to optimize the energy usage, implement data
management systems to store and process metering and
control data. AMI helps for financial benefits, improved
services and opportunities for consideration of environmental
concerns. Advanced meters shall have bidirectional
communication between the consumer and the power
provider, recording of energy usage, communicating the data
to the utility, service connect and disconnect switches with
capability to measure power disturbances.
III. POWER QUALITY MEASURING TECHNIQUE FOR
AMI
Specifications of AMI reveal that Power Quality Analyzer
(PQA) is a part of Advanced Metering Infrastructure for Smart
Grid implementations. Having all the Power Quality issues
well defined and the requirement of power quality analyzing
in various real time applications being crucial, the low cost
PQA under development would be versatile and rugged. The
PQA under development would measure the basic electrical
parameters like phase voltage, phase current, power and
energies along with power quality parameters like voltage
sag/swell, interruption, harmonics, flicker, magnitude
deviation, frequency deviation, phase deviations of both
146
voltage and current. The monthly tariffs will also be made
available calculating the amount of consumed energy for
every month.
An efficient algorithm will be implemented and the PQA
will be developed in an advanced embedded system such that
it can be held as real time equipment measuring instantaneous
values of voltage and current and showing all the above
mentioned parameters whenever it is prompted to. A front end
will be developed, shown on a touch screen Liquid Crystal
Display (LCD), combined with the multi tasking concept
making the measuring and displaying as separate threads. An
illustration of connecting the developed embedded system
with a Personal Computer (PC) using the advanced
International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) protocol,
IEC61850, will be done for later substation automation. The
data of all the parameters monitored will be made available in
the internet using Ethernet.
A. Embedded processor for PQA
The PQA embedded system core is made of LPC3250
controller which has the ARM processor embedded in it.
LPC3250 is the NXP Semiconductor’s product. ARM is a
design company which manufactures ARM processors. ARM
is a 32 bit embedded processor which has combined features
of both Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) and
Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) architectures and
supports around 266MHz. This feature of ARM having an
impure RISC architecture makes it being an efficient
embedded system rather than just being a raw processor. The
main difference which it exhibits from the RISC architecture
is in its instruction set. It supports few multiple cycle
instructions involving stack load store multiple instructions, an
inline barrel shifter for pre processing, special conditional
execution for improving the performance and enhanced
Digital Signal Processor (DSP) 16x16 bit multiply and
accumulate instructions for digital signal processing. Thus
ARM is not a single core but a whole family of designs
sharing similar design principles and a common instruction
set.
The chips which have ARM as a processor will follow the
Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA). The
data flow inside the ARM processor will be using ASB (ARM
System Bus). The slower on-chip peripherals will connect to
the processor with APB (ARM Peripheral Bus). Faster
peripherals like SDRAM use special bus called AHB (ARM
High performance Bus) for communication. The AHB has two
versions, the Multipurpose AHB for having more than one
master on-chip and the AHB–Lite for one master and multiple
peripherals.
The ARM processors possess specialized hardware for
protecting various tasks. The units implemented for this
purpose are the Memory Protection Unit (MPU) and the
Memory Management Unit (MMU). When various tasks are
implemented using ARM, the MPU makes one of the task
which is currently running as active and remaining tasks as
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dormant. The dormant task will be protectted from the code made to implement a powerful algorithm of testing every
currently running thus protecting them. Thee MMU is again a sample as and when it obtainns from the ADC. The testing
hardware which in addition to providingg protection also involves checking whether thee sample is deviating from the
provides a virtual memory for executing various
v tasks. The reference wave and quantitativvely determining the amount of
MMU maps the addresses between the mainn memory and the deviation and the event whichw made it happen. Both
physical memory. The MMU makes possible p for the magnitude and phase angle deviation is taken care of.
implementation of multitasking. The MM MU reserves some AD7654 which sample bothh current and voltage inputs
space in the physical memory called page tablest to store the simultaneously works at 500 Kilo samples per second. This
details of various tasks that are to be executeed. Of those tasks, means that each sample can bee obtained in 2.5 micro seconds
one task runs in the virtual memory and thhe remaining tasks and more than 5000 samples caan make one cycle. Thus we can
remain dormant having their code protecteed in the physical measure typical transients of more
m than 5 micro seconds rise
memory. When there is a context switch, the pagetables route time. Basic electrical parameeters like each phase voltage,
to the next task. By activating different pagetables on a phase current, powers, pow wer factor and energies are
context switch, it is possible to execute multiple
m tasks with calculated using standard formuulae.
overlapping virtual addresses.
B. PQA prototype implementation- Hardwarre Development
The Block diagram of PQA hardware setup s is shown in
Fig. 2.Voltage and current signals from threee-phase four-wire
system (whose power disturbance is monittored) are stepped
down using potential and current transfoormers. The three
phase voltage and current signals are coonditioned to the
required level of +/-1.25 V using Amplifierrs / attenuators. A
16-bit high-speed Analog to Digital convertter (ADC) is used
to digitize the incoming signal. The AD77654 is a 16-bit,
simultaneous, two-channel ADC. The inpputs are sampled
simultaneously at a sampling frequency of 400
4 KHz. The use
of noise-shaping sigma delta converter maakes higher order
anti ailing filters unnecessary. The singlee ended common
mode input signal is buffered through thee buffer amplifier,
AD8021, before feeding to ADC input point..
The nominal input level is 2.5V p-p full scale. A 2.5V DC
signal is fed as reference to the ADC. The ADC
A is interfaced
with controller using Serial Peripheral Inteerface. Each ADC
has two channels to convert voltage and currrent signal of each
phase. Totally three ADC’s are used for thhree phase voltage
and current signals. Each ADC chip sellect is controlled
through Input & Output (I/O) ports of ARM processor.
Measured parameters are displayed in LCD and internet using
Ethernet port of the LPC3250 controller. Figure 3 PQA deveelopment flow chart

If the RMS value of the voltage

v is greater than 110% or
less than 90% of the rated valuue for a duration of greater than
half a cycle and less than 1 minnute, it is deemed to be Voltage
Swell or Voltage Sag reespectively. Similarly if the
instantaneous value of the actuual voltage is greater than 110%
or less than 90% of the instanntaneous value of the reference
voltage for the duration less thhan 2.5 milli seconds, then it is
deemed to be positive and negative
n transients respectively.
Voltage harmonics, interrupptions, unbalance and phase
sequence detection techniquess are being implemented as per
the standards.
The sample count per cyclle is kept as 200 and software
Figure 2 PQA Block Diagram generated transients, sag and sw
well are shown in the Fig. 4.
The PQA software development flow chart c is shown in
Fig. 3. As a starting point of developing the PQA,
P the device is

147 ICRTIT-2012

Figure 4 Voltage transients (Negative & Positive), (Poositive and Negative)
and Voltage Sag and Voltage Swell generated with
w software.
The illustration of virtual memory usage is shown in the
Fig 5. The figure shows the LCD screen divided into two
windows one showing the waveform and thhe other giving the
information about the RMS value and evennt parameters. The
logical cache is used as a virtual memory and though code is
stored in the separate physical memory, thee code for printing
pixels of both the windows execute in the same virtual
memory space.
Figure 5 Illustration of Virtual Memory usage.
C. IEC 61850 communication protocol
International Electrotechnical Commissioon has developed a
new global standard, IEC61850, for comm munication systems
in Power station. IEC61850 is an Ethernet based protocol
148
standard which has been useed for the design of electrical
substation automation and for data communication.
Substations use a number of controllers for the purpose of
protection, measurement, allarms, etc. Integrating these
controllers, supplied from different
d manufacturers using
different communication protoccols involves high cost and high
system maintenance. Using IEC61850
I ensures that all the
equipments in a substation communicate with the same
protocol. IEC61850 standardss are given in 10 major parts,
each part defining the vaarious aspects of substation
communication network. IEC661850 give standard models for
circuit breakers, transformers, etc. One of the main features of
IEC61850 is its support for inteeroperability.
When advanced/smart metters from multiple vendors are
implemented in substation for automation IEC61850 Protocol
is required for interoperabilitty. The measured and control
variables for different applicaations are designated as under:
MMXU (measuring for operative purpose), MMTR
(measuring for commercial puurpose), MSQI (sequences and
imbalances, for stability purppose), MHAI (harmonics and
inter-harmonics, for power quuality purpose, XCBR (circuit
breaker), XSWI (switch), CS SWI (switch controller), ITCI
(remote control interface). Thee LN class of the logical device
(in this case it is smart meterr) is shown in the Fig. 6. Each
measured parameter is subscrribed with name of the meter,
reference of the meter, typee of measurement, name for
measured quantity and actual measured
m values with units. This
information is transmitted to PC and other devices through
Ethernet port for interoperabiliity and control between devices
in the substation for automationn.
Figure 6 IEC naming convventions for Interoperability.
D. IEC61850 communication protocol
p testing
The implementation of IE EC61850 standard aids the
availability of PQA data in thhe World Wide Web in that it
arranges the data in the protoccol emphasized by the standard.
It requires the creation of serrver with ARM processor and
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Figure 7 Test results observed with Interneet Browser.
implementation of the basic Transmission Control
C Protocol /
Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) whose data segment will contain
the PQA information in the IEC format. The standard
demands data to be available in Extended Markup
M Language
(XML) but for initial development proccess Hyper Text
Markup Language (HTML) protocol is impplemented so that
the data can be very well viewed in the innternet explorer or
any browser by calling the server with its IP. Measured
parameters are communicated to PC annd observed with
internet browser as shown in Fig. 7.
E. Role of Advanced/Smart Meters in Domesstic Sector
The current electricity system does not n include active
collaboration of houses and buildings. This severely limits the
effectiveness of energy management effoorts. In order to
achieve next-generation energy efficiency annd sustainability, a
novel smart grid architecture based on o smart houses
interacting with smart grids is needed. This architecture
enables the aggregation of houses as inteelligent networked
collaborations, instead of seeing them as isollated passive units
in the energy grid. Smart houses demands smart meters for
intelligent networking. Smart meters will w provide new
opportunities and challenges in networked embedded system
design and electronics integration. They willl be able not only
to provide near real - time data, but also proccess them and take
decisions based on their capabilities and collaboration
c with
external services that in turn will have a signnificant impact on
existing and future energy management models [7].
F. Need for data labelling in advanced meterr/smart meters
The smart meters must have the capabiliity to measure and
generate large amounts of information. Information generated
is useful to a utility if they are saved in a sppecific format. The
monitored and stored data to be useful, theree is a need to relate
the data to location and time at which it iss obtained and the
ability to relate this data to the data from other locations, is
one of the basic requirements for developingg control strategies
as inherently implied by the concepts of Advanced Metering
Infrastructure and smart grid. So to render the t data useful, the
149
measured data (basic elecctrical parameters) & other
parameters from a smart metter, the information has to be
tagged with time stamp. The innformation to be tagged are the
electric phase, the feeder numbber, the bus feeding the feeder,
the substation serving the geographical area where the
customer is located etc [6].
IV. SMART GRID /ADVANC
CED METER INDIAN SCENARIO
The total installed capacity of power generation in India is
about 160 Giga Watt (GW) annd the target for 2012 is about
200 GW. Transmission and disstribution losses are amongst the
highest in the world averaging 26%. Smart Grid is a new way
to use a network to optimiise the delivery of energy to
consumers to manage efficienncy, reduce cost and increase
reliability [10].
Crompton Greaves is actiively involved in Smart Grid
research and development activities. It initiated the
development and integrationn of products like integrated
Supervisory Control and Dataa Acquisition (SCADA) system
solution for Smart Grid envirronment on in-house developed
cromp SCADA platform as per p IEC61850 standard, smart
metering solution, smart load controls
c and shedding solutions,
Smart load break switches / secctionalizers etc.
NDPL has become the firrst power distribution utility in
India to realize the performannce advantages of an advanced
Outage Management System (OMS). This will help NDPL
respond more quickly to powerp failures. The system’s
software tools identify and assess
a failures. It has built its
Smart Grid Maturity Model (SG GMM) to realize the Smart Grid
vision and target. The Capaability SGMM from Carnegie
Mellon and the Software Engineering
E Institute changed
software development globallyy.
Bangalore Electricity Suppply Company (BESCOM) is
responsible for power distrribution in eight districts of
Karnataka [4]. At present, the ouutage faced by a customer on an
average is 86 hours per year with large interims per outage.
BESCOM plans to drastically reduce
r the outage average by 80
percent, ensuring that any inteerruption does not last for more
than 3 minutes. There is a tangible benefit of increased
revenue gain over a period of tiime.
V. CON
NCLUSION
In this paper importannce of Advanced metering
Infrastructure, specifications of advanced meters are detailed.
Essential features, required sppecifications and technological
development of advanced meteers/smart meters are discussed in
this paper. One of the features of advanced meter is power
quality measurement. ARM controller based hardware setup
and software algorithms useed to monitor power quality
parameters along with test ressults are detailed. To make the
system more versatile IE EC61850 web protocol for
communication is under devvelopment. The team already
developed web based Energyy Management System (EMS),
based on LonWorks and Modbus M technology with smart
meters, internet server and stanndard communication protocols.
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 The advanced meter has the capability to become the part
of web based EMS with interoperable features, for cost
effective AMI to meet Smart Grid applications.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We sincerely thank Dr. Pawan Kapur, Director, Central
Scientific Instruments Organization (CSIO) Chandigarh for
providing infrastructures, facilities and encouragement to
work in this area of advanced metering infrastructure, smart
metering and smart grid technologies.
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