Automatic Electric Meter Reading System(AMR)

Automatic Meter Reading and Billing System (AMRBS) is the remote collection of consumption data from customers' utility like Electric meters using radio frequency, telephony, power-line or satellite communications technologies and process the data to generate the bill. Now a day, AMR is heavily used in the abroad for collecting reading and billing purpose. In our country, the electricity billing system is completely manual. The electric meters are situated in the houses, offices and factories etc .Meter readers go to the place which are generally situated inside the house and take the meter reading. Most of the time the owner bribes to the meter reader person to have less meter reading. As a result corruptions occur and actual payment is not received by the service provider. So the provider faces a huge amount of loss in every year. At this present situation, it’s very necessary to implement AMR in Bangladesh.

It was realized by us that it’s very important to implement AMRBS in Bangladesh. So it was proposed to the supervisor to do this project. After working for few months the AMR using Wimax technology successfully developed .All the current AMR system analyzed carefully and found a optimal way of AMR system which can be implement in Bangladesh in a efficient way.



Thesis work:

The objectives for creating the Automatic Meter Reading & Billing Systems are:

• Our main objective of this thesis was introduced a AMR which will be cost efficient.
• To reduce data collection costs.
• To improve meter reading accuracy.
• To enable faster, more efficient reading times and billing process.
• Significantly increase operational efficiency by providing real time pricing and time-of-use metering
• To improve customer service.
• Enable conservation of resources.
• Estimate usage on a daily or hourly basis and enable advance purchase of supply at wholesale rates.

Millions of Analog meters are already used in our houses, offices, industries. So we are not proposed any new meter. We want to develop a miniature module which will take reading from analog meter and then convert this data into digital 0, 1 bit sequence. And this module also responsible for transmission of data to the provider end. At the provider end there will be another module which is responsible for data receiving. And this module makes an interface with computer which is responsible for data processing.This is a groupwork project.This is can be implemented.

Group name:

A Thesis submitted

by

1. Tanvir Ahmed(AIUB)

2. Kh.Golam Sarwar(AIUB)

3. Md.Suzan Miah(AIUB)


Discussion:

In this thesis work we tried to develop Automatic Meter Reading using Wi-max. The ultimate goal of our project and thesis was to implement AMRBS in Bangladesh and remove the current meter reading system which is completely manual. Our goal was also to show the importance and benefits of implementing AMRBS and make a feasible AMRBS in the perspective of Bangladesh. Our target was also to improve the performance of present AMR system which are exists all over the modern world. We analyzed all the current AMR system and also observe the performance of those current systems. Finally we identified that none of the current AMR systems are feasible in Bangladesh. We found the appropriate AMR system which is cost efficient and affordable for Bangladeshi peoples. We know all of the houses in our country which has electricity connection have electric meter. Basically most of these meters are still analog. So we made our system in such a way that the existing meter will be unchanged. We made a miniature module that contains reading part and some portion of communication part. We attach this small module with the current existing meter. So our idea was create an external module which wills miniature in size and also low in cost.

In Bangladesh, metering process is still long and old process. As first, Meter readers go to the meter places and collect the reading for every month. After that new reading enter in bill processing system which may take few weak for processing. But in our AMRBS system provider will get the real time data. After requesting for data any one can get the instant reading.

In our current billing system, as meter reader go to the meter place for collecting data they take extra money from the customer which is illegal and make happy the customer by showing wrong and low reading. As a result the providers are not getting the actual bill from the customer. Most of the times the providers fall in lose. Our AMRBS overcome this short coming of the current system by providing the real time data. Providers spend a huge amount of money for the collecting the data by the meter reader. In our system, providers do not need any meter reader person.