Visual sensors for remote metering in public networks L. Ferrigno, IEEE member DAEIMI, University of Cassino, Cassino, Italy ferrigno@unicas.it V. Paciello, IEEE member, A. Pietrosanto, IEEE member DIIn, University of Salerno Fisciano (SA), Italy {vpaciello, apietrosanto}@unisa.it Abstract — New research trends in energy grids and water networks push toward ICT solutions for allowing remote metering of consumptions. In the paper, after an introduction to the European Standards on smart metering, a visual sensor thought to solve typical metering problems in water public networks is described. Particular detail is given to its hardware and software solutions and to the perspective of integration with analogous gas and electric energy metering devices. Keywords – Automatic Meter Reading (AMR), Remote Metering, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Smart Metering, Visual Sensor. I. INTRODUCTION In December 2008, the European Union approved an agreement on the so-called "climate and energy package 20-20- 20’’, which foresees, by 2020, many targets on several fronts: a 20% reduction of greenhouse gases emissions, a 20% increase in energy efficiency and the achieving of share of 20% in alternatives renewable energy; the U.S. government has also moved along the same lines [1, 2]. The research of innovative Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) systems and Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI) plays an important role in the treatment and billing consumption data of the main public utilities services such as electricity, gas and water. Through the architecture of remote-management of consumptions, it is possible to do in remote all the actions that were previously possible only with the intervention of readers, or teams of technicians: reading data, enabling of the supply, fulfillment of power switches, management of the takeover, etc…. Since the remote-reading can also be made at short intervals, the user gets to pay only the energy actually consumed and in this way he excludes any presumed data. The knowledge of the consumption profiles in real-time, enables who manages the energetic networks to create mechanisms of greater dynamism, flexibility, decentralization and interactivity in the management of the networks themselves (smart-grids); in addition, it also provides the user the ability to have a greater awareness of what is consuming. Also it is possible to implement numerous services of high added value as the automatically detachment of loads "energy-eating" and reducing the peak’s consumption; in scenarios where the price of energy varies dynamically in a manner that depends by time slots, the system would allow to manage the domestic devices to reduce the consumptions during hours of higher cost and to optimize the costs related to energy consumption. Higher frequency of detection of the readings can finally allow to easily identifying both losses on the private network user downstream of the meter and losses related to failure of the measuring instrument, which would involve missed billings with economic losses for utilities. In order to facilitate the development of architectures for smart metering and to avoid competition between different technologies, in March 2009 the European Commission gave a mandate to CEN, CENELEC and ETSI to develop the standards needed to implement an open architecture of interoperable Smart Metering systems (M/441 EN) [3]. The European project Open Public Extended Network Metering (OPEN Meter) is partner invited to the mandate of standardization as the project's objectives are in line with the mandate. The project results will be a series of open standards, without rights on standards and will be available to all stakeholders; the project includes more than remote reading service for utilities, new energetic services to added value; measurement devices become nodes of communication networks [1]. Governments, through national energy regulators, are requiring utilities to realize the architecture for Smart Metering. Concerning Italy, in October 2008 the law 155/08 of the Authority for Electricity and Gas made compulsory the use of the latest generation measurement devices, which are essential for reading and remote management [4]. The European Directive 2004/22/EC, known as the MID (Measuring Instruments Directive), regulates ten different categories of instruments and measurement systems and gives particular attention to software for metrological aspects and to data treated by AMR and AMI architectures [5]-[6]. The relationship between users and utilities will result deeply changed in the direction of a greater transparency and less discords, if the AMR and AMI architectures will be designed according to these standards. Without going into too much detail, an architecture for the smart metering (see Fig.1) is provided with bidirectional communication interface and transfers the data of meter readings to a central system that stores them and makes them available to back-office systems of utilities. The connection in the Home Area Network (HAN) between home devices and the smart meter (or between the smart meter and a metering gateway which acts only as a single communicator) can be performed on protocols in power line carrier (PLC), or on low 978-1-4244-7935-1/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE