Smart agent based prepaid wireless energy meter

Abstract

Prepaid meter (PM) is getting very popular especially in developing countries. There are many advantages to use prepaid meter as opposed to postpaid meter both to the utility provider and to the consumer. Brunei Darussalam has adopted PM but it is not intelligent and not wireless enabled. Reading meters and topping up balance are still done manually. Utility provider does not have information on the usage statistics and has only limited functionalities in the grid control. So accordingly a novel software agent based wireless prepaid energy meter was developed using Java Agent Development Environment (JADE-LEAP) allowing agent from utility provider to query wireless energy meter for energy values of every household. These statistics can be used for statistical computation of the power consumed and for policy and future planning.