Studies On Automatic Meter Reading System

The reconstruction of home meters engineering and the development of city raise the consuming of home meters (watermeter, watt-hour meter and gasmeter) fast. The traditional home meters and manual meter reading can not satisfy the new billing methods of stepwise-water-price and time-separation-charging. In order to improve the management, it is necessary to develop the automated meter reading system (AMRS). Along with the new computer and electronic technology, it is possible to design an economic, stable, reliable and accurate AMRS.Based on the need of application and technology, this dissertation will put forward a new encoding method for home meters, whose Hamming distance is one, and a three-layer structure for AMRS. The main conclusions are summarized as follows.1. recall the application background, the new occurring problems and the state of the art of AMRS.2. design a three-layer structure for the AMRS.3. present a novel digitizing method for the traditional home meters, i.e., a novel Hamming encoding method, whose Hamming distance is one, and the principle of the novel identifying method for encoded digits.4. give the circuit design for central reading unit based on the principle and protocol of a novel bus-instrument bus(M-BUS).5. design the AMRS based on GPRS network.6. design the management software for AMRS by using POWERBUILDER.