The Client
The client includes utility providers that distributes or manages, which can be
- Smart cities
- Residential / apartments based management bodies
- Agencies associated with distribution and manufacturing of utilities
- Industries that wish to use utility management intelligently
- Aquatic centres - swimming pools
- Airports/Metro/railway that uses water/any utilities
- Hotels/universities/resorts/shopping malls/hospitals/convention centre’s etc
The Business Challenges
Aging infrastructure among utilities needs a system to operate much more efficiently unlike the human to read meter, manually check the data on a meter on site, and unable to analyse the data to predict the usage patterns and finding the faults (leakages) in the system etc. are some of the problems that are being faced by the clients and also an efficient customer relationship to be taken care by the system to reports complaints. The utility infrastructure needs an improvement due to the scarcity of the utility resources and the low revenue rates, the unbilled and errors due to leak and frauds are to be alerted.The challenges above can be summarized as
- Scarcity of utility resources
- Manual reading of meter
- Low revenue rate
- Unbilled revenue from utility - inaccurate measurement of consumption
- Leak detection
- Optimised billing process
- Reliable water supply
- Integrating multiple protocols
The Business Requirement
A solution to help utility suppliers, industries, and the communities that wish to manage the utility resources like water/gas/electricity is the challenge and our product provides a single integrated infrastructure to support these needs.
We propose a solution that will help in the problems as stated above and which will be helping in:
Remote reading of the meters, integrating the data with the infrastructure to provide an assistance to make decisions and forecasting the resources and also for efficient and reliable supply, the system will be also helping to identify the unauthorized usage of resources.
The infrastructure will be able to customize the billing and the consumption data are analysed for improving the leak detection and to prevent the data being tampered as well as to reduce water losses.
The Solution
The solution aims to provide clients remote access to their usage data and also alert them of any unwarranted patterns in their consumption and leakage detection through our Utility usage module and billing through the Utility billing module which can be customized upon the client requirements to improve the revenue utility ratio with support to payment integration and an accounting module to manage the incomes and expenses. The Customer Module helps the customer to communicate to the providers about complaints, requesting services.
The infrastructure provides a service to notify customers and the organizational structure through the Messages Module. The system also supports the remote operation and maintenance of devices through the Device Management Module and system supports multiple integration of protocols like wm-bus, lora, sigfox and many more in the lists. Notification module helps to represent the data in a concise manner when an unusual event occurs on the system like leak detection, complaints, due bills etc.
Our systems offer a multiple type of info-graph data through the Map Module which will be data regarding the meters which are operational and non-operational, device mapping and leak detection etc.. (which is under development)
Benefits
The main benefits offered by the application are
Usage Module: Identifies deviation from normal usage and leakages, graphical representation of the consumption data.
Billing Module: Customized billing for any type of customer, Bulk billing and individual billing.
Customer Module: Manages customers more efficiently and able to receive and solve complaints through the system.
Notification Module: Manages the notification when certain events occur on the system.
Technical Overview
The web application is developed in Laravel ( PHP framework ) with a database in MySQL.
Why Laravel?
- MVC Support and Object-Oriented Approach
- Built-In Authentication and Authorization
- Packaging System which helps in plug and play features
- Command line interface called as Artisan
- The Eloquent ORM
- Templating engine
Version control is done via Git and Bitbucket repository system is used for systematic integration of features and enhancements. Secure API’s have been set in place for effective communication with the hardware and Mobile Application. We use R Script to detect high usage, leakage as well as to Generate Usage Report of utility. Apache Kafka and Apache Cassandra are being implemented to enhance data analysis and performance. We are following Agile development for the implementation with biweekly rollouts of fixes , enhancements or new features. We have a team of dedicated QA which helps to release high quality updates.
The Results
The project evolved a lot along the way and so did the possibility of services this could provide. We adapted to the changes and are constantly improving on the features.
- User management system
- Customer management system
- Device management system
- Meter Reading management
- Billing and Payments system
- Complaints management system
- Tasks management system
- Messaging system
- Region and Section management system
Hiighlights
- Data Analytics for accurate resource management
- Usage Reports and Graphs which gives the utility provider and customer insight into how they have been utilizing the resources
- Billing can be calculated by usage as the readings are updated to the cloud
- Payment module is integrated with the system and customer’s can make payments through the system itself
- Faulty meter alerts is a feature that is currently under progress and will be rolled out soon
- Multi Utility system provides organizations to manage multiple utilities on the same platform
- Complaints and ticket tracking system to ensure timely management of issues
- Bulk Upload readings to import readings when needed as a backup plan
Technologies Used
- Laravel 5.3 Framework
- Mysql 5.6.20 DB Server
- Sentinel 2.0 Package
- Hackzilla/Password-Generator 1.3 Package
- Recaptcha 2.3 Package
- Drupal 7.3 CMS
- PHP 5 Programming Language
- Bootstrap 4 Frontend framework
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Language
- PHP 7.2
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Database
- MySQL-4.8.4
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Framework
- Laravel 5.8.26
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Others
- Javascript
- Jquery
- CSS
- Bootstrap
- R
- D3
- Google Charts
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IDE
- Netbeans 11
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Ticket Tracking
- YouTrack
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Version Control
- BitBucket
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Repository
- Git
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Wireframe
- Draw.io
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Continuous integration Tool
- Jenkins
