Distributed Ledger Smart Sensor Billing Architecture
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Current utility network infrastructure systems face challenges in accurately configuring smart sensors for specific billing rates and meter configurations, predicting resource consumption, and securely sharing billing data, leading to inefficiencies and financial strains on utility suppliers.
Innovation Solution
A distributed ledger system is implemented in a tiered utility architecture, enabling smart contracts for near-real-time payments, dynamic rate applications, demand response events, and location awareness, while ensuring enhanced security through encryption schemes that obscure digital addresses.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If decentralized networks are implemented to reduce latency and improve robustness, then communication speed and system reliability are improved, but security concerns and regulatory compliance difficulties arise
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a distributed ledger as an intermediary layer between smart sensors and utility networks. This ledger acts as a mediator that records and verifies transactions, configurations, and data exchanges in a decentralized manner while maintaining security through cryptographic mechanisms. The ledger enables peer-to-peer communication without centralized control points, thus improving robustness while addressing security concerns through distributed consensus and immutability.
2Productivity
If distributed ledgers are used to enable smart contracts and real-time billing, then billing accuracy and resource allocation efficiency are improved, but system complexity and implementation difficulty increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements smart contracts that enable self-service functionality for billing and resource allocation. The smart sensors automatically execute pre-programmed agreements stored on the distributed ledger, performing actions such as real-time billing calculations, resource provisioning, and demand response without requiring manual intervention or complex centralized processing. This automation improves billing efficiency while the modular smart contract design helps manage system complexity by breaking down complex operations into reusable, standardized components.
3Reliability
If encryption schemes are implemented to obscure digital addresses and protect consumer information, then data privacy and security are improved, but processing overhead and transaction time increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements preliminary cryptographic setup where digital addresses and consumer information are pre-encrypted and stored on the distributed ledger before transactions occur. The encryption schemes are established in advance, allowing transaction processing to proceed efficiently by simply referencing pre-computed encrypted values rather than performing encryption operations in real-time. This approach maintains strong data security while minimizing the time penalty associated with cryptographic operations.
Data Source
AI summary
A distributed ledger based utility system architecture may be configured to enable secure payments, data transmission, and meter configuration of smart sensors. The utility system architecture may be a tiered architecture including multiple nodes at different levels of the architecture where each level may contain a different portion of the distributed ledger. As information is added to the distributed ledger, each portion of the distributed ledger may be updated based on whether the information is relevant to that node. The information may include rate contract transactions, meter configuration data transactions, payment transactions, or the like.