DB&A: An Open Source Web Service for Meter Data Management

With the increasing number of initiatives dealing with storing meter data, systems that perform Meter Data Management (MDM) constitute a critical component for realising the potential benefits of the smart grid. However, most of the MDM systems designed today are generalised to such an extent that they do not consider the relational structure of electrical system. Furthermore, these systems do often not restrict themselves to specific data latency requirements. To address this issue, this paper presents the Database & Analytics (DB&A), an open reference implementation for a MDM system that is instantiated as a web service. Its design is based on a set of design goals, an explicitly addressed data latency scope and five real-world scenarios. We present an abstract model of the metering hierarchy that allows MDM systems to be used as compositional services, forming a service tree. Moreover, we provide implementation details about analytic functions to support the service tree. The DB&A is evaluated on a cloud and embedded platform using a subset of data constructed from a case study that includes 8 months of real data. The results show that the DB&A complies with the boundaries of the defined data latency scope for the cloud and embedded platform.