Advanced Metering Infrastructure for real time load management in a smart grid

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is an active area of research for real-time load monitoring, dynamic pricing of power and for regulation of peak loading to minimize the stress on the electric grid caused by irregular loading patterns. Thus, AMI promises to fulfill key requirements essential for the realization of smart grids. This paper proposes a metering unit for monitoring and controlling load on the distribution side for peak load management in real time and addresses a few of the design considerations necessary for such a metering infrastructure. Further, data collected from the proposed automated metering system are processed to generate patterns of loading such that dynamic pricing schemes can be applied. In this work an embedded controller is used for the hardware realization of the metering unit and ZigBee wireless communication protocol is used for building the network that connects these distributed meters to the control tower that acts as the base station of the network. It is the aim of this work that such a metering unit will provide a practical design that is easy to implement and the proposed data processing technique can be instrumental in the formulation of versatile dynamic pricing policies.