Fudura and Info Support Realize Metering Company of the Future

On top of that, the energy sector is facing a transition from fossil to sustainable and from centralized to decentralized. So you can rightly speak of a disruption, which forces parties to think about how they want to remain relevant in the future. For Fudura, this is reason to ‘future-proof’ the company. Fudura focuses on the non-regulated business market and ensures that companies can optimize their energy supply, offering services such as advice, measurement of energy flows, design and realization of infrastructure and rental and maintenance of charging stations, transformers and switch installations.

Fudura is increasingly evolving towards an ICT- c.q. data-driven organization. Charging stations, solar panels, but also the need for better matching of supply and demand lead to enormous data flows. Fudura must adequately handle these flows of (measured) data, while customers expect these to be presented quickly in the form of analyses, information and reports. An enormous challenge and reason to take a fresh look at the entire measurement chain.

Together with Info Support, Fudura first conducted a Proof of Technology. This proved the technological feasibility of the target architecture to process many and various measurement data quickly and cost-effectively. The results of the Proof of Technology were positive and were included in the business case. Based on the business case, Fudura decided to intensify the current cooperation with Info Support and start a project together to develop the Fudura Energy Information Exchange (Fenix). Fenix forms the “engine” of the new digital metering company and offers the following functionalities:

• Reading in measurement data from different collection head-ends;
• Support for near- and real-time data streams;
• Central storage point for secure storage of measurement data;
• Working with virtual measurement points defined by calculation rules;
• Automatic and (semi-)manual validations and corrections;
• Direction of market interaction processes;
• Low-threshold analysis of available measurement data.

Fenix is a cloud native application that leverages various PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) cloud services from Microsoft Azure, such as Azure App Service, SQL Database and Azure Storage. With this type of service, the customer does not have to deal directly with maintaining infrastructure. Thanks to the scalability of Fenix and efficient use of the underlying cloud services, the performance of the system is guaranteed with large numbers of connected meters.

One of the challenges in the project is the efficient storage of large amounts of measurement data. To do this cost-effectively, a hybrid solution was chosen. Incoming measurement data is initially stored in a Redis Cache. Redis is an in-memory, low-latency buffer that makes reading in measurement data very fast. Next, the measurement data is asynchronously written to Azure Table Storage for long-term storage at low cost.

Quality is paramount at Fudura. Not only in carrying out the tasks as measurement manager in a continuously changing market, but also in the development of the software built within the company. Quality is ensured throughout the process by a Continuous Integration Pipeline in Azure DevOps, which checks that the solution compiles after each addition of new functionality, runs all developed unit, integration and end-to-end tests and performs static code analysis through SonarQube. In addition, an integration with the SIG (Software Improvement Group) has been realized in the pipeline to ensure that code quality is also checked against independent standards. The SIG score is an important measure of how easy a system is to maintain and extend.

Fenix is being brought to production in phases through continuous delivery. By splitting the project into several partial deliveries, it has been made both functionally and technically possible to take separate, iterative deliveries into production. This way of working allows Fudura to let the commissioning of Fenix take place incrementally within the data management department. No big-bang, and all the risks involved, but a calm transition for both data management staff and IT personnel.