Copy forward register

In the event of natural disasters such as storms, floods, and wildfires, the affected areas are likely to suffer from significant damages and utility outages. Typically, meters in these areas also stop communicating, so utilities would not receive any data during these periods.

For the service points affected in this natural disaster scenario, utilities want to assume zero consumptions during the disaster period, use a read that was previously acquired through the network for the current billing process. The Copy Forward Register routine performs estimation on register reads that failed validation, by copying forward the most recently received register read.

The Copy Forward Register estimation routine can only be applied to register channels, because it is a register estimation routine.

It can be added to an estimation set, and then either automatically executed when a register validation fails, or you can also trigger it from a manual estimation.

It can be set on a PBC program or on service point instances.

This Copy Forward Register estimation routine can be used with IEE's Validation and estimation set overrides functionality. This function lets you assign a new VE set temporarily to a service point, and overrides the original VE set from the service point program.

As with other estimation routines, it performs estimation on register reads that have failed validation and are marked with Estimation Needed status. The routine estimates the register by finding the most recent actual register and copying it forward. The estimated read is marked with Estimated status. This routine uses an existing system setting, which is the Max Days For Base Usage Register. This setting determines how far back the routine should look for the most recent actual register.

IEE determines which register is considered of a “good” quality and can be copied forward as follows:

  • Estimated registers or actual registers that have failed validation cannot be used.
  • Actual registers that have passed validation or edited registers can be used.
  • Following a meter swap (which is considered a critical configuration change), registers that belong to the previous meter cannot be used.
  • The routine does not consider a meter’s inactive status. If the meter is inactive, its registers can be used for estimation and can be estimated by this routine.

This estimation routine can use all register reads, regardless of how they arrive into the system:

  • Imported from ARI
  • Imported from SRI or SRI-E
  • Manually edited
  • Imported via ISAIM.

For more information about configuring this estimation routine, see Configuring estimation routines: Common parameters.