05-3 Residential AMR based on international standa
One of the strengths of DLMS/COSEM is the simple fact that it has been accepted and it is widely recognised as an international standard for meter data exchange.
In promoting DLMS/COSEM for various applications, co-operation between the DLMS UA and international standardisation organisations has always played an important role. To facilitate this, the DLMS UA has established a formal liaison with IEC TC 13 WG 14, and has requested to be formally recognised by the IEC as the registration authority for the IEC 62056 series of standards.
In Sweden, a country in the forefront of market liberalisation, latest regulations require that as of July 2009, meters of all residential customers with direct connection of <80A be read once a month. This means that more than 5 million meters have to be remotely read.
For the Swedish experts, it is clear that AMR on such a scale must be based on international standards. IEC 62056 - DLMS/COSEM has been identified as an obvious candidate, although due to its wide scope and flexibility, it is seen by some people as a very complicated standard tailored to high-end industrial applications.
Therefore, through the Swedish member of IEC TC 13 WG 14, they asked help to investigate how DLMS/COSEM could be used for simple residential applications.
Based on a draft requirements specification, the object model of a simple residential meter has been developed in co-operation between the experts of Sweden, IEC TC 13 WG14 and the DLMS UA. This model is shown on the Figure below. It supports active energy metering, power failure monitoring, diagnostics, parametrisation and remote data exchange.
It is further studied now together with protocol aspects by a team of Swedish experts. As described above, the current IEC 62056 standards would cover the need. Should a request for a more "lean" version arise, this may lead to an IEC New Work Item Proposal for the development of a companion specification to the current IEC 62056 standards to cover the special needs of residential AMR.
Figure: Object model of a simple residential meter The model has been presented on the European Utilities Intelligent Metering conference in Stockholm in April 2005.