Cognizant 20-20 Insights

How to Generate Greater Value from Smart Meter Data

By managing and analyzing smart meter event data, utilities can improve customer experience, grid reliability, operational efficiency and revenue assurance.
Executive Summary
Utilities have made significant investments in smart meter roll-out programs and are now looking for ways to get a return on this investment. In addition to ROI, regulators are pushing utilities to show how these investments are helping to improve operational efficiencies and deliver enhanced levels of customer service. Industry-led efforts such as Green Button1 are utilizing smart meter read data to provide customers with visibility into their energy usage data and consumption and billing patterns, as well as tools for what-if scenarios. However, the other category of data generated by smart meters meter events is a relatively new concept for utilities, and its true value is largely untapped. Some utilities in North America are just at the early adoption stage of gaining insights from event data. Event information relayed from smart meters includes real-time device status, power quality information and meter status information, all of which provides a very powerful source of information to improve utilities core business processes. Based on our experience with and observations of the changing nature of utilities industry operations, we believe that information captured from events can be used to derive useful insights to vastly improve customer experience, grid reliability, outage management and operational efficiency. The challenge lies in managing the high volumes of event data and applying logical and predictive analytics to it, such as filtration, association, correlation, factor analysis and regression, as these are relatively new concepts for most utilities. This white paper discusses the numerous logical and statistical techniques that utilities can utilize to tap the potential of events information. It also illustrates how these techniques can be applied to improve the outage management process (outage detection, verification and restoration) and enhance operational efficiency and field crew optimization.

Meter Event Data: Beyond Interval Reads

Smart meters are well known for their ability to provide meter read data at smaller intervals, such as every 15, 30 or 60 minutes, as well as bidirectional communication and remote operating capabilities. In addition to these features, smart meters also generate hundreds of meter events.

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An event is information that originates from the meters endpoints and can have several attributes, including source and proxy information, severity level and event category. The source is normally the device that originates the event, while the proxy is the device responsible for detecting and communicating the event. Severity levels include emergency, information, error, warning and clear. The event category provides information regarding the process to which the event is related. There are four basic event categories:

Deriving Business Value

By now, many utilities are broadly aware of the possible areas where they would like to leverage information from events. However, the real challenge lies in how to develop the processes and systems to continuously convert data into actionable information and then further refine the models based on the results. This challenge arises because of the nature of event data, both status and exception. Event data is a raw data stream and is also associated with high volumes because there are hundreds of events generated for normal operations, as well as for changed conditions. These events also need to be validated with other relevant information, as they basically manifest the conditions of the network (meter or grid) and also some aspects of customer behavior. To manage the above needs, we believe that utilities need to focus on two key dimensions:

Meter or device status events, such as power restore and last gasp. Power quality events, such as voltage sag, swell and high/low voltage alarms. Meter or device tamper flags, such as reverse energy flow. Meter hardware information, such as low battery alarms and battery critical alerts.

Potential Business Areas for Events Data Insights Some of the potential business areas where information from meter events can be used to derive useful business insights are:

Systems to manage large volumes of events data, both real-time and batch. Logical and statistical techniques that will help identify the right events and correlate with various conditions, both event- and businessrelated, and, finally, predict the outcomes.

Customer experience: Events like last gasp and power restore, which can identify field outages and take proactive action even before the customer calls, as well as alerts and notifications to customers regarding power outages. Outage management: Events to detect outages at the right device level and create proactive tickets, as well as power restore to identify nested outages after large-scale outage restoration. Power quality: Events like voltage sag and voltage swell, in correlation with other device status information to proactively identify open neutrals and flickering lights. Revenue assurance: Events like meter inversion and reverse energy flow, along with meter reads to identify power theft and abnormal usage/demand patterns. Smart meter network operations and monitoring: Events and meter ping commands to identify damaged/defective meters, access relays and other devices, as well as hardware events to provide information regarding device hardware such as battery information, firmware version, etc.

Key logical and statistical techniques that could be used include:

Data filtering: This refers to the analysis of events and intelligent filtration of redundant data based on predefined conditions from the event data stream. This technique uses Boolean logic.2 Based on our experience, events like last gasp and power restore are relayed multiple times from the smart meters due to reliability considerations. These kinds of events have the same event occurrence intervals but different event insertion times. Hence, in such cases, duplicate traps could be filtered from processing using timing conditions. Association rules: Algorithms or business rules to enable the discovery of relationships between events and other variables. Inputs received from other systems, such as work management systems (WMS), customer information systems (CIS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, may be associated with event information to determine device-level issues before rolling out to the field crews. Also, events received from the smart

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meters can be logically segregated based on the inputs received from such systems.

analysis and regression will be required to obtain the correct results.

Point-of-detection algorithms: These algorithms can help develop patterns of their occurrence, which can help in taking proactive actions. For instance, time-wise and day-wise patterns for events can be developed. Further, filtration criteria can be applied to remove all patterns caused by electric, communication or network issues, and then the remaining patterns can used to explain occurrences of certain business outcomes, such as outages, power quality or device tampering. Data clustering: This is an unsupervised model that uses data similarity to group the data points. Similar categories of events can be clustered together, with analysis performed to extract business value from the clusters of events. For example, we can identify clusters among all event types and then develop relationships between outcomes and clusters of events. Device status, meter tamper and power quality events can be a cluster to determine issues such as open neutrals or flickering lights. Correlation: This measures the association between two variables, while assuming there is no causal relationship between the two. We can develop a correlation among various events and other outcomes to determine future behavior. For example, correlation between event type and consumption fluctuation can help with revenue assurance. Factor analysis: This allows variables to be grouped into common sub-groups in order to reduce the number of factors to be initially analyzed. For example, by performing factor analysis, we can identify dominating factors that contribute to events or a set of events or an outcome. Regression: This refers to the statistical relationship between two random variables to predict the outcome. Commonly used for forecasting purposes, regression examines the causal relationship between two variables. An example is using regression to analyze the relationship between equipment conditions in the field, such as a prediction of transformer failure, based on the demand from meters associated with it.

Improving Outage Management through Meter Events

Smart meter events such as last gasp and power restore that provide meter off/on status can be used for improving outage management. Being near-real-time, these events have an advantage over outage information coming from customers and field staff. Event information generated by smart meters is raw data with duplicate traps and high volume due to:

Momentary outages and restoration-related events. Communication and network interface issuerelated events Events due to planned outages, outages at the lateral, feeder or transformer level, customer disconnects, etc.

Hence, it is practically not possible for outage management systems3 to process raw event data in the same way as they currently process inputs from SCADA systems, customers and field staff. Many utilities realized this when they integrated event information from head end systems (HES) directly into their outage management systems. In order to effectively use events data, an event processing and analytics engine is required. This engine needs to have the capabilities of logical filtration based on uniqueness of events, momentary and existing outages and capabilities of association based on physical network hierarchies. It also needs to have pattern analysis or regression capabilities to predict the outages. A multistage event processing and analytics framework identifies confirmed cases of outages that can be passed to the outage management system for restoration (see Figure 1).

Stage 1: A set of conditions is used to filter duplicates from last-gasp events to identify unique cases of outage events. Such events are then correlated with power-restore events to remove the cases of momentary outages (outages with a duration of less than 60 seconds). Further, inputs from other systems such as CIS and WMS are considered to segregate outage events that have occurred due to existing planned maintenance, meter exchange or customer disconnect. The remaining outage events are considered as realized events.

Usually, more than one technique might be required to solve the problem. For example, to develop a relationship between device status and outage, a combination of correlation, factor

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Event Processing and Analytics Framework

Stage 1 Event Processing Event Filtration Event Realization Stage 2 Probable Outage Outage Escalation Outage Comparison Stage 3 Confirmed Outage Outage Verification Outage Confirmation

Figure 1

Stage 2: In this stage, the meter-level realized events from Stage 1 are escalated to a higher level of device hierarchies (lateral, feeder, transformer, etc.) and compared with other device inputs using association rules and conditions to identify an outage incident. These cases of outage are considered to be probable cases that need to be tested further. Stage 3: During this stage, the probable cases of outages from Stage 2 are verified using remote meter ping functionality, and only confirmed outage incidents results are communicated to the outage management system for further action.

meter data management (MDM), WMS, distribution automation and SCADA (see Figure 2). This will enable effective outage management and crew optimization by focusing on real outage events from smart meters. The benefits of this approach include:

Early and accurate outage detection, leading to improvement in power system reliability indices such as CAIDI, SAIDI, etc. Early detection of momentary pnd planned outages to help avoid costly field visits. Outage and restoration verification to avoid costly field crew movement. Improved intelligence due to inputs from applications such as CIS, WMS and SCADA .

The event processing and analytics engine needs to be integrated into the utilities system landscape, comprising the head end system, CIS,

Smart Meter Event Processing: Business Context Diagram

Distribution Area Applications
SCADA Field Force Automation
Field Work Execution

Smart Equipment Data

Feeder Telemetry Data High-Quality Events Data

Head End System/ Smart Meter

Events Data

Real-Time Status Check

Smart Meter Event Processing Solution

Real-Time Status Check

Outage Management System

Customer/ Premise Data

Planned Outage Data

Customer Information System/Meter Data Management System

Work Management System

Figure 2

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Cognizant Smart Meter Event Processing (SMEP) Solution

Our Utilities Practice has designed a smart meter event processing (SMEP) solution for improving the outage management process. The SMEP solution is configurable to meet dynamic business requirements and is based on multistage processing and analytics. Our SMEP solution is designed to provide the functionality required to process huge volumes of real-time outage meter events data. The following are the key features of the SMEP solution:

In addition to the above features, SMEP has been designed using the event-driven architecture (EDA). EDA helps orchestrate the generation, detection and consumption of meter events, as well as the responses evoked by them. It helps effectively manage events and communication with various application processes using messaging (see Figure 3).

Conclusion: From Data to Insights

The concept of leveraging meter events data to gain business insights is at an early stage. To effectively convert raw data into meaningful insights, utilities need to build state-of-the-art methods in logical and predictive reasoning with data management capabilities. The theory of integrating and exploiting logical and statistical data relationships is quite new; most utilities are still at an early stage of the maturity curve, primarily reporting on and dashboarding the smart meter analytics they gather. Analytics need a combination of sound business and statistical capabilities, which many utilities lack. Statistical capabilities include knowledge of statistical methods, statistical tools such as SAS and an ability to provide statistical inferences.

Near-real-time processing of a high volume of meter event data. Business rules-based engine to configure the algorithms and rules to process the events. Dynamic and flexible control based on requirements from other utility systems. Business process management to effectively route and manage events/incidents. Integration with other utility applications for validation, association and correlation. Visualization and dashboarding tools.

Smart Meter Event Processing Solution

Stage 1
Event Preprocessing Event Event Filtration Renement

Stage 2

Stage 3

Conrmed Outage Probable Outage Outage Outage Outage Verication Escalation Comparison

Enterprise Service Bus

Head End System

Meter Events

Outage management system/other applications

Visualization and Dashboarding

Database

Event Log Entry

Smart Meter Event Processing Solution

Figure 3

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Hence, utilities need to have a two-pronged approach. In the short to medium term, utilities can build solutions largely on logical techniques where they have sufficient development experience and can leverage vendors and partners that provide statistical capabilities. For the longer term, utilities need to take a holistic approach toward analytics, keeping in mind the

needs of the enterprise and leveraging various sources of information (not limited to meter read or event data) based on the assessment of the current state of process and people skills. They should consider various approaches, including building analytics skills through a Center of Excellence for Analytics or developing collaborative models with vendors specializing in analytics.

Footnotes
1

Green Button is an industry-led effort in response to a White House call-to-action http://www.greenbuttondata.org/greenabout.html. Boolean logic consists of three logical operators: OR, AND and NOT http://booleanlogic.net. Outage management systems develop alternate supply plans and create job orders for restoration.

2 3

References
Electric Power Industry Overview 2007, U.S. Energy Information Administration, http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/prim2/toc2.html. Deepal Rodrigo, Anil Pahwa and John E. Boyer, Location of Outage in Distribution System Based on Statistical Hypotheses Testing, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1996, p. 546. Deepal Rodrigo, Anil Pahwa and John E. Boyer, Smart Grid Regional Demonstration Project: Project Narrative, DOE-FOA-0000036, August 2009. Deploy Smart Grid in Difficult and Varying Terrain, Silverspring Networks, http://www.silverspringnet.com/services/mesh-design.html. Doug Micheel, Smart Grid Implementation: The PHI Story, Pepco Holdings, Inc., Presentation to the 2011 GreenGov Symposium, Nov. 2, 2011. 1-210 Single phase Meter, GE Energy, http://www.geindustrial.com/publibrary/checkout/GEA13391?TN R=Brochures|GEA13391|PDF. 1-210+c SmartMeter, SmartSynch, http://smartsynch.com/pdf/i-210+c_smartmeter_e.pdf. Krishna Sridharan and Noel N. Schulz, Outage Management Through AMR Systems Using An Intelligent Data Filter, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, Vol. 16, No. 4, October 2001, pp. 669-675. Lise Getoor and Renee J. Miller, Collective Information Integration Using Logical and Statistical Methods, University of Pennsylvania. Peter Yeung and Michael Jung, Improving Electric Reliability with Smart Meters, Silverspring Networks, 2012, http://www.silverspringnet.com/pdfs/whitepapers/SilverSpring-Whitepaper-ImprovingElectric-Reliability-SmartMeters.pdf. Yan Liu, Distribution System Outage Information Processing Using Comprehensive Data and Intelligent Techniques, Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan Technological University, 2001.

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About the Authors

Dr. Sanjay Gupta is Cognizants Director of Consulting within the Energy and Utilities Practice of Cognizant Business Consulting. He has more than 20 years of global energy and utilities industry experience in consulting, business development and business operations and has led and executed consulting engagements with several large global customers. Sanjay is also responsible for developing industry solutions and services, with a focus on smart grid/smart metering, asset optimization, analytics, renewable energy and operations management. Sanjay holds a doctorate degree in energy and power and a masters in engineering. He can be reached at Sanjay.Gupta@cognizant.com. Ashish Mohan Tiwari is a Consultant within the Energy and Utilities Practice of Cognizant Business Consulting, with six-plus years of experience providing consulting services in the implementation of IT systems for the utilities industry. He has extensive experience in smart metering infrastructure, smart grid data analytics solutions and enterprise asset management. Ashish has worked on numerous transformation engagements in the areas of process consulting, package evaluation and solution design for global utilities companies in regulated and de-regulated markets. He can be reached at AshishMohan.Tiwari@cognizant.com.

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