INFORMATION ABOUT AVE 2 PROJECT - AUTOMATIC REMOTE DATA READING AND ITS HISTORY

The idea of creating automatic remote data reading system of natural gas consumption has been around since the year 1999. The concept was proposed by Severomoravská plynárenská, a.s. The company bought Elcor-94 gas-volume conversion devices made by Elgas s.r.o. The devices were installed at many of their gas service points. The installation kit contained an original software utility for setting devices and reading data archives. Elcor-94 devices were connected to land-line network via modem or they were connected through to a mobile network via GSM modem. Prices for data transfer using these connections were much higher than today, so calling to each station (particularly intercity connections) was very expensive. Land-line to GSM as well as GSM to land-line connections were particularly expensive. It was common practice for several users to call the same data station in order to get data and all of them had their own copy of data. This repeated transfer of data was not cost-effective and was one of the reasons for creating of a centralized automatic remote data reading system from gas-volume conversion devices called AVE. Another reason was the need to unify software and settings of their installed devices such as Datcom and MicroElcor.

These requests were introduced to GEOVAP, spol. s.r.o. Pardubice, where the system was developed accordingly, and later successfully implemented in SMP, a.s. There were a couple hundreds of gas service points to read at that time. Today, there are more than 2800 gas service points.

In 2002, Pražská plynárenská, a.s. showed their interest because it was a very well designed system concept. In contrast to SMP, a.s., Pražská plynárenská, a.s. has installed not only Elcor-94 and Datcom, but also gas-volume conversion devices made by Elster. It was necessary to add a new communication driver for these devices and Elster devices were integrated into the AVE system. Pražská plynárenská, a.s. also expressed interest in presenting data for their customers on the internet. After detailed analysis, the add-on module called Internet AVE was developed. This module was designed for the presentation of data in the form of consumption diagrams via internet. Each user can login to the system using his username and password and see data only from his gas-volume conversion devices. Internet AVE is integrated into the "corporate identity" of Pražská plynárenská, a.s. Today, about 500 gas service points are read there.

The AVE system was installed in Jihomoravská plynárenská, a.s. in 2003. Naturally, each company had differing approaches to datareading and processing.

Východočeská plynárenská, a.s., Středočeská plynárenská, a.s., Severočeská plynárenská, a.s. and Západočeská plynárenská, a.s. This important step, along with standardizing methods of reading and processing data made it possible to unify the system in such a way that all the companies in the RWE Group could use the same functions and steps for collecting and processing data.

System development in connection with organization changes in RWE and gas market liberalization.

The AVE system has been installed and put into operation in all the distribution companies of RWE Group. Gas market liberalization, the unbundling process, organization changes, RWE Group restructuring, unification of customer information systems (CIS) and other events demanded the ability to adapt the AVE system to those changes. The changes were so fundamental in nature that adaptation would be difficult. It was necessary to create a new system concept with these realities in mind.

AVE 2 is a completely new system, based on client-server architecture and Microsoft´s most modern technologies, which guarantee unlimited coverage of the whole RWE Group. This advantage is useful for example, when considering business with gas: One dealer deals with customers from several distribution companies at once. By law, the dealer must be given access to customer data. In AVE 2, after it's reading, data from every station in every distribution company is available immediately, and everywhere. This “unlimited” concept allows the gas dealer to login to Internet AVE and get data from all its customers at once.