Hydroelectric power plants are required to record a plethora of meter readings twice a month in order to follow up key business, supply and operative metrics. Meter reading must be done with high reliability as many of the values are critical. Misreading may result in financial losses, customer claims and operative risks.
Currently the workers at hydroelectric power plants must visit their facilities following the above mentioned schedule to read analog meters and record readings. This is time consuming and repetitive activity, and requires expertise and diligence. In certain regions of Japan, the regulations require that the meters must be read with the human eye.
The Digital Agency, an organization created in 2021, has a mission to accelerate the country’s digital transformation. In 2022 the Japanese government identified about 10,000 clauses in different regulations that were considered to mandate using analog work procedures. The government has created a two year roadmap to revise these clauses to enable modernization of regulated work processes with new technologies like AI. One of the selected focus areas is analog meter reading.
Morpho AI Solutions, Inc. was selected by the Digital Agency to verify a technology of remote analog meter reading. The solution has to enable various ways to execute the meter reading according to requirements set by the industry, regulation and utilities themselves. The level of automation varies from updating meter values to data repositories up to initiating operative actions based on meter values meeting predefined criteria. Morpho AI Solutions utilizes its proprietary solution Duranta for implementing remote monitoring.
Top Data Science has an extensive knowhow and experience to provide AI based services for industrial companies and organizations. We utilized this competence while developing a robust and scalable computer vision solution for meter reading (see the blog). By joining forces with Morpho AI Solutions we establish an ideal partnership for building a solution that can scale to a country level usage in Japan.
The first experiment will be conducted at Oita Prefecture in January 2024.
Author:
Shun Hirai, CEO
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Digital Agency
Digital Agency was created in September 2021 to oversee Japan’s catchup on digitalization and to boldly promote Digital Transformation across society. The Digital Agency makes its best effort to eliminate inefficient technology use in government and focuses on the digitalization of improving systems to support daily lives of people.
Morpho AI Solutions, Inc.
Morpho AI Solutions is a company engaged in the commercialization of AI (Artificial Intelligence). We promote the introduction and actual operation of cutting-edge AI technologies such as AI-OCR and AI-Camera in the areas of social infrastructure such as government, electric power, transportation, and manufacturing.
Digital Agency office location
By Akonnchiroll – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138039798
