Service mode

Service Mode provides data collection support for IEE, including support for remote interrogations and handheld file (HHF) imports. Service Mode synchronizes IEE databases to a black-box MV-90 xi system through the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). The WCF interface synchronizes configurations, remote interrogation tasks, load profile, register, event data, and communication log information, and allows data in transit between the IEE client machines, application servers, Service Mode servers, and database servers to be encrypted using the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) cryptographic protocol database access, from the Service Mode server and xiComm servers. IEE can support multiple Service Mode servers, and each Service Mode server can support multiple xiComm data collection machines/servers. xiComm is the data collection program that establishes the remote connections to meters and runs the various Translation Interface Modules (TIM) to remotely download data from Commercial and Industrial (C&I) meters.

System configurations of Service Mode processes are managed on each Service Mode server and are performed using the Service Mode client, primarily to define the xiComm machine configuration and task retry parameters (at a Service Mode level). TIM assignments that define the meter types that are read on each Service Mode server are pushed to IEE, and associated with the Service Mode server. Each Service Mode server is configured as an external system in IEE.

Following are some of the elements of Service Mode:

• Meter configurations, either created/imported or modified, are pushed from IEE to Service Mode. If the configuration does not exist prior to scheduling a call to the Service Mode server, the configuration is pushed at that time as well.
• IEE remote interrogation tasks, both automatic and manual, create tasks in the task list that are replicated to the Service Mode server. Task status changes are returned to IEE for up to the minute monitoring of the current task status.
• The TIM module returns registers, events and communication log information back to the IEE application server. Load profile data is returned through a different service to the IEE application server. Data import tasks are scheduled to import the collected data.
• xiCOMM is responsible for returning register data, event data, and communication log information back to the IEE application server.
• The Service Mode server is responsible for returning load profile data and task file updates back to the IEE application server.