Solução automatizada de testes de validação em medidores eletrônicos de energia elétrica

Abstract

Electronic electricity meters are devices frequently found in residences and industries, and since they are predominantly embedded systems, they require a concern about their performance and quality, because such systems may fail and cause problems for the customer, for the energy distributor and to the manufacturer. Therefore, when produced for the market, electricity meters must undergo extensive processes to validate their functionalities and behaviors, which are designed by regulatory agencies and by the companies to ensure the quality of their final products. The objective of this work is to present in a complete way an optimized and already implemented solution for automated validation tests of electronic electricity meters. This approach has been discussed since the validation of these equipments is fundamental, and that a manual and scalable execution of the tests has become obsolete, observing the constant increase of its complexity and, consequently, of the failures that can happen. Thus, it was justified that the automation of these tests guarantees a greater agility, reliability, a lower cost, and a greater coverage of the situations exposed to the meter. As part of the solution, is included the suitability of the communication specification, as well as the development of the automated structure, using LabVIEW and TestStand software products from National Instruments, and, finally, the execution of the tests automatically, comparing it to the manual executions.