Automated Meter Reading System for CEB

Abstract

The Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) is the largest and only integrated electricity producer and supplier since 1969 to Sri Lankan consumers. CEB is catering for both retail & bulk customers. Where bulk consumers are responsible for 50% of the revenue. Due to the competitive bidding procedure digital smart meters provided for these consumers were purchased from various vendors which makes billing complicated due to cross-platform incompatibility. Need specific network accessories in addition to currently available remote meter reading systems in the market make this process more expensive. Thus, the need for a separate automated solution to connect all devices into the main Heavy Supply Billing System (HSBS) was aroused. This could minimize the labor cost and potential human errors. Developing an automated solution in-house for in-expensive vendor independent remote smart meter reading and writing directly into database from any type of network is the main objective of this project. Using this system CEB could make the billing process faster and bills readily downloadable on the next day after the reading from the CEB datacenter. By implementing this solution, CEB is mainly focusing on streamlining the reading collection process while reducing work force and also enhancing this process and the automation application to get real time reading processing and automatic bill calculation. This will be a benefit for a corporate customer to get real time reading and billing information for their industries. Further this solution will be improving for the mobile version software hence the users get more benefits from that.