Accurate Allocation of energy in production processes - the importance of using metamodels

A brief history of energy management tools
Crafting appropriate distribution keys is often a tedious task that is undertaken
once a year - with meticulous attention to details and hard work. Without the
appropriate software tools, it is almost impossible to monitor their evolution
permanently.
Over the last ten years, the market for dedicated energy bookkeeping software
has grown and there are now a number of applications for collecting, validating
and reporting metering data. Most of the 156 energy management packages
referred to above, indeed provide real-time monitoring.
When it comes to providing insights and linking metering data to the
organisation structure, however, only a very small number of those packages
provide the option to do so. Dealing with changing structures proved even
more problematic, as none of those applications provided an option to take
into account changing structures without heavy custom development.
Taking into account energy conversions and allocation energy throughout such
processes, turned out to be an even greater challenge that none of them could
address.
The fundamental reason for these shortcomings, is the lack of an adequate
metamodel at the core of the current generation of energy management
software. Such a metamodel provides all contextual information that is needed
to interpret raw metering data. It describes the structure of energy flows
(inflows, conversion, outflows); the structure of the company (the organisation
chart); and the position of key people (those with responsibilities, as they will
need dedicated periodic reports) within it.
The metamodels in the software - which were present in only a fraction of
the packages to begin with - are hierarchical and static. A hierarchical model
would give each asset a fixed position within a set structure, where it belongs
to one and only one higher category (e.g. a meter belongs to a building, which
in turn could be part of a site). Energy conversions, however, break this mould
as several commodities - and thus their meter readings - are combined and
recombined in different configurations. As the models are also static they are
not aware of any changes that may have occurred, impairing the ability to draw
conclusions.
All this points at the dawn of a new generation of energy management software,
built around appropriate metamodels and able to allocate energy in changing,
process-based settings.
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