2016 Online International Conference on Green Engineering and Technologies (IC-GET)

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) with

combination of Peak Load Management System
(PLMS) and Theft protection
Nithin B, Sreebha Bhaskaran and Ullas S
Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering,Amrita School of Engineering, Bengaluru,
Amrita VishwaVidyapeetham,Amrita University,India
nithinb2008@gmail.com , sreebha@gmail.com , cs.ullas@gmail.

Abstract—The main objective of the paper will be to combine
smart meter with Load Management System (PLMS) and theft
detection. The purpose of this paper will
be Smart Grid interoperability and standards relevant to the
Indian context, development of indigenous low-
cost smart solutions. In advance metering infrastructure we will
be aiming to monitor the real time consumption of electricity
through IOT and provide necessary control over the
consumption. In this we will also find solution for black-out
management by providing some bug correction from the service
centers to the domestic consumers. In peak load management
system currently we are providing total power cut for all types of
loads, instead of that we can have two separate connections for
light loads and power loads . At the peak time we can cut the
power only for power load and provide supply to light loads. By
doing this we can avoid the use of inverters for domestic
purposes. Inverters are having a major drawback as it consumes
more power and will deliver only less power as output. Since
most of the domestic consumers are having inverters, power cut
is of no use. So by implementing peak load management (PMS)
some solution can be provided for this problem. If in case there is
an urgent requirement of power for some appliances and the
consumer is willing to pay extra money at peak load time then
they can get High power loads with additional cost .The
consumer can login to the consumer page provided by the
electricity board and agree for paying extra money at peak load
time or otherwise with the additionally provided breaker in the
circuit which can be manually turn on during the peak load time
consumer can have this benefit but on additional charges.
Keywords—theft,peak load,load management.
the load scheduling at peak time by providing two separate
control circuit for high and low power loads.
Nowadays power cut is of no use because we are using
invertors in home to store energy before power cut and will
deliver power at the time of power cut. Invertors are not an
efficient device because in invertors we are using lead acid
battery. The maximum efficiency of lead acid battery is
85%,and again it depends on many factors. Which means if
we are giving 1 unit of energy in that 0.15 unit is wasted. The
inverters are also not 100% efficient. It is actually an dc to ac
converter. The efficiency of inverter varies from 50-98%.So
providing an inverter is not an feasible solutuion. This paper
mainly focus on this problem and theft.
II. EXISTING SYSTEM
Earlier we started with electromechanical type energy meter.
Now it is changed to electronic energy meter which have some
protection for theft. But these kinds of energy meter does not
provide complete solution for theft. The electronic energy
meter the reading should be taken manually which is a hectic
process and also it need more human labor. The peak load
management is commonly done by cutting the power to whole
area.
III. SYSTEM CONFIGURATION AND MODELING
The smart energy meter can measure, monitor, analyze
energy consumption and communicate with the servers. The
development of smart energy meter has brought a great change
in metering.

I. INTRODUCTION
One of the major area of smart city is smart grid. In smart
grid smart energy meter plays an important role. In olden days
we were using ordinary electromagnetic disk energy meter.
Now it is the time of smart energy meter. The most important
part of smart energy meter is real time monitoring. In real time
monitoring a remote server will being updated with real time
power consumption. The reading will be updated along with
the current consumption and other important details. This
project will be useful for domestic as well as for the
commercial customers. This project also aims at controlling Figure 1 Block diagram

978-1-5090-4556-3/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE

 2016 Online International Conference on Green Engineering and Technologies (IC-GET)

The main objective of the paper is to combine smart

energy meter with Load Management System (LMS) and
Theft protection. This paper will be useful for domestic as IV. SIMULATION SCENARIO
well as for the commercial customers. This paper also aims at In this simulation some assumptions are maintained and
controlling the load scheduling at peak time by providing two some sets of scenarios are tested. These scenarios are
separate control circuit for high and low power loads. The classified into two one regarding the metering and other is
energy meter will have two current sensor and one voltage regarding theft protection. The power factor of the system is
divider circuit for measuring the input voltage(Figure 1). The assumed to be constant and is set as 1.The maximum current
energy meter will be using the controller Atmega 32 in ardino that can be measured is 20 Amps and maximum voltage that
uno board. In this energy meter there is two relays provided can be measured is 420V.The maximum power consumption
one for high power loads and other for low power loads. The of low power line is also assumed to be 2 Amps.
high power line will be provided for all high power loads
which consume more power such as air condition,induction For measuring the voltage we are given a potential divider
cooker,water hetater etc. The low power line consisit of total circuit with 2K ohms and 100K ohms resistors in series. The
of 2 Amps,such that we can connect necessary lights and some voltage is measured across the 2K ohm resistors.
low power loads such as LED bulbs,LED TV,modem etc.
An Lcd display is provided for the consumer to view the
power consumtion and voltage reading. In figure 1 the virtual
terminal represents the communication interface between the
Energy meter and the Server.
A. Protection against Shorting the Phase Line and
Disconnecting the Neutral Line
It is one of the common ways of theft in energy meter. To
prevent these kind of theft we have to separate current
measuring device which is kept in the phase line and one in
neutral line. If phase line in shorted the current measuring
device kept in the phase line won’t detect current and the
value will be zero, but the current measurement device kept in
the neutral line will detect the current. In the microcontroller
both the phase current and neutral current will be compared. In Figure 2 Voltage Divider circuit
this situation the current in both current measuring device
won’t match so the relays kept in the phase and neutral will be With reference to figure 2, the R1 is kept as 100K ohm and
turned off and alert the server side which is represented by R2 is kept at 1.2K ohm. So if we are giving 230 v as input
virtual terminal. If the neutral is disconnected then current voltage after the voltage division we will get output as 2.72
measuring device in neutral will show zero and current V.So the aurdino can measure maximum upto 5V. The range
measuring device in the phase will measure some current. which we can measure from the supply is 420V.The aurdino
Since this current is not matching the circuit will trip. for 5V it will have 1024 resolution so the multiplying factor is
0.4115.For current measurement we have two sets of circuit
B. Protection against both Shorting and disconnecting the one with Operational Amplifier (op-amp) and another with
Phase Line and the Neutral Line measuring current across one resistor.
In this case of both disconnecting and shorting of both phase
and neutral line the both current measuring devices measures
zero current flow. The voltage measuring device will also
measure the voltage as zero. Whenever the voltage measuring
devices measures zero the device will enquire about the status
of power in the nearby area. If the status is positive it will alert
the server regarding the theft or if it is negative it won’t take
any action. Figure 3 Op-amp comparator circuit
C. Protection against opening or tampering of energy meter With reference to figure 3 circuit will amplify the voltage
Consumer can open or tamper the meter to show less difference between V2 and V1.Here the voltage V2 is given as
power consumption or no energy consumption. For avoiding 230 V and voltage V1 will depend on the current flowing
this problem there is one pressure switch kept at the opening through the 0.25 ohm resistor. The resistors R1 and R2 are
side in which one terminal is connected to ground and one to kept as 10k Ohms. The current measurement is taken from
Vcc. So whenever the meter is closed the switch makes 0.25 resistor and ground. Aurdino board can directly measure
contact with the ground and the microcontroller will detect the voltage difference and can be converted into suitable scale.
this and alert the Virtual terminal. The scaling factor found based on the test was 0.0195.
 2016 Online International Conference on Green Engineering and Technologies (IC-GET)
A. Testing for theft protection
The first test done was for protection against shorting the
phase line. It is done by enabling one switch which will short
the phase line. The second testing was done for disconnecting
the neutral line. When the neutral line is disconnected, the
current will flow toward the earth without going to the second
current measuring device.
Figure 4 Level Switch
One more protection is done for Tampering which is done
by a level switch(figure 4). Normally the switch will be closed
the 5 V will directly come to the aurdino board. If the meter is
opened or tampered the switch will become open and the 5
volt will flow to the ground and aurdino will measure 0 V.
B. Simulation Tool and Components
The basic tool used for implementing and evaluating the
system was Arduino IDE and Proteus 7. Arduino IDE 1.0
helps in compiling and generating hexadecimal file. Proteus
tool helps to draw a circuit embedding all the components of
system and makes the system more understandable.
The system is implemented using Arduino Uno board. The
Uno is a microcontroller board with ATmega328P as
controller. It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can
be used as PWM outputs). It has 6 analog inputs (A0-A5). It
is having a crystal oscillator of 16 MHz frequency.It also has a
USB port connection, a power jack, an ICSP header and a
reset button to reset the board. It has everything needed to
support a microcontroller. It can be connect to a computer
using a USB cable. It can be power with a AC-to-DC adapter
having output of 5V or by battery of output of 5V.
1. LCD Display: LM016L 16 X 2
Figure 5 LCD Display
The figure 5 shows the Liquid Crystal Display. There are
14 pins for LCD in which we are using 9 pins for display. In
that 4 pins are used for data transferring.
2. Relay: OMIH-SH-105L
It can work both in AC and DC. Switched Voltage for AC
is 250V and for DC is 30V. The Maximum Switched Current
is 10Amps and Maximum Switched Power is 2,400VA,
300W..Coil Voltage is from 5 to 48VDC. Nominal Power: 720
mW Op-amp. It is used as a comparator circuit. The
amplification gain is set to one by making the feedback
resistors same as that of input resistor.
3. Resistors
Various ratings of resistors are used in the system. It is
mainly used for voltage division and to measure current. The
resistors used are:0.2Ω,100kΩ,1.2kΩ and 10kΩ.
4. Bulb
Here bulb is used to represent load inside the house. Every
bulb is rated for 230V.The resistance value of bulb are
100Ω,150Ω,20Ω.So the power consumption will be V/R. That
is
230/100=2.3Amps,
230/150=1.53Amps,
230/20=11.5Amps.
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
We use four switches to turn on different power
consumption. Additional three switches are used to bypass the
meter. The bulbs are rated at different resistors such that the
current consumption can be varied. The supply voltage is kept
at 230V.User input is given through Virtual terminal(from
figure 6). In the circuit design the red lines are representing
phase lines .The blue lines represents neutral line and yellow
lines are representing bypassing lines for the meter
,Remaining all green lines represents data lines.
Figure 6 Simulation outline
A. Low power circuit ON
For enabling low power circuit we sent command “1”
through virtual terminal. This is converted into ASCII value
that is 49(figure 7).
 2016 Online International Conference on Green Engineering and Technologies (IC-GET)
Figure 7 Virtual Terminal showing Lamp 1 ON
While receiving that command relay RL3(figure 6) will be
turned on and Lamp 1 will glow if the switch is also closed.
Figure 8 Lamp 1 ON
Figure 9 Lcd display when Lamp1 ON
Figure 8 shows the power consumption when only lamp 1
is ON and reaming all light is OFF. Figure 9 shows the power
consumption and voltage at which the lamp 1 is working.
B. Low power circuit OFF
For disabling low power circuit we sent command “3”
through virtual terminal(figure 10). It is converted into ascii
value that is 51 and Lamp 1 will be turned OFF.
Figure 10 Virtual Terminal showing Lamp 1 OFF
C. High power circuit ON
For enabling High power circuit we sent command “2”
through virtual terminal(figure 11). It is converted into ascii
value that is 50 and lamps in the high power line turn on if
switch is ON(figure 12).
Figure 11 Virtual Terminal showing Lamp 2 ON
\
Figure 12 Lcd display when Lamp 2 ON
D. High power circuit OFF
For disabling low power circuit we sent command “4”
through virtual terminal.It is converted into ascii value that is
52 and Relay RL4 will be turned OFF(figure 13).Both High
power and low power line can be turned off by sending
command “5”.
Figure 13 Virtual Terminal showing Lamp 2 OFF
E. Testing for phase line shorting
For shorting the phase line we enable a switch which will
bypass the current measurement device 1 and relay 4(figure
14).Here the current measurement device 1 will measure some
different current and current measurement device 2 will
measure current according to the load so there will be a miss
match and all power to the system is turned OFF by disabling
all relays. The LCD will show currents and will display miss
match(figure 15).
Figure 14 Virtual Terminal output for phase line bypassing
and relay turn OFF.
 2016 Online International Conference on Green Engineering and Technologies (IC-GET)
Figure 15 Lcd output for phase line shorting.
F. Testing for neutral line shorting
For shorting the neutral line we enable a switch which will
bypass the current measurement device 2 .Here the current
measurement device 1 will measure accurate current and
current measurement device 2 will measure zero (figure
16).So there will be a miss match and all power to the system
is turned off by disabling all relays. The LCD will show the
miss match in the display(figure 17) .
Figure 16 Virtual Terminal output for neutral line
bypassing and power OFF.
Figure 17 Lcd output for neutral line bypassing
G. Testing for Whole Meter Bypassing
Whole meter bypassing means disconnecting the all meter
from the circuit .The only way to protect is to send power
availability status to the server if power is available sent error
signal to the meter and show it is bypassed. The virtual
terminal will show the message regarding the bypass(figure
18) and the LCD will show the message regarding the phase
and neutral line(figure 19).
Figure 18 Virtual Terminal output for meter bypassing.
Figure 19 Lcd output for whole meter by passing
H. Testing for tampering meter
For tampering the meter we disable a switch which make
the pin A3(analog input pin 3 in aurdino board) zero and when
the switch is close 5 V will come to the aurdino input pin A3
.If the voltage read is zero then all relays will be cut off and
there by power will be turned off(figure 20). Figure 21 shows
the status in virtual terminal and LCD will show that meter is
opened(figure 22).
Figure 20 Virtual Terminal output and circuit for before
tampering .
Figure 21 Virtual Terminal output and circuit for after
tampering .
Figure 22 Lcd output after Meter opened.
VI. ANALYSIS OF RESULT
The system is tested for all kinds of input scenarios. For all
kind of inputs, system behaves as expected. All four theft
conditions are tested and system detects all theft and trips the
circuit. The following Table 6.1 shows the results for testing
of control of low and high power lines.
 2016 Online International Conference on Green Engineering and Technologies (IC-GET)

Table 6.1 Test results of controlling of Low and High Table 6.2 Test results of Theft detection
power line Testing Low and Low and Output
LOW HIGH LOW HIGH condition High High
Testin Power Power Power Power Power line Power line
Termi
g line line line line status before status after
nal Output
condit status status status status testing testing
input
ion before before after after Testing for ON OFF CT1 not
testing testing testing testing phase line equal to CT2
Low Low shorting Power cut off
power power Testing for ON OFF CT1 not
49 OFF OFF ON OFF
circuit line neutral equal to CT2
ON ON line Power cut off
Low Low shorting
power power Testing for ON OFF Phase and
51 ON OFF OFF OFF
circuit line Whole neutral line
OFF OFF Meter opened
High High Bypassing Power cut off
power power Testing for ON OFF Meter
50 OFF OFF OFF ON
circuit line tampering opened and
ON ON meter Tampered
High High Power cut off
power power
52 OFF ON OFF OFF
circuit line
OFF OFF VII. CONCLUSION
Low Low In this paper the smart energy meter was designed and
and and tested for different condition. The meter successfully protected
High High against all type of theft and give according output in the
53 OFF OFF ON ON
power power virtual terminal as well in LCD display.
circuit line
ON ON References
Low Low
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