The realities of testing meter firmware upgradeability

One of the critical issues facing electric utilities and their regulators is the need to ensure that technologies or solutions that are selected by those utilities will be interoperable. Further, many utilities want to ensure that the systems they select will allow for evolution and growth as Smart Grid standards evolve. To manage change in a dynamically growing Smart Grid, it is essential to be able to remotely upgrade firmware, such as that found in meters, without replacing the equipment or manually performing this in the field. Remote image download capability will permit certain characteristics of the meter to be substantially altered on an as-needed basis. This discusses the challenges involved in the standard-to-testing lifecycle, including the development of a set of requirements, constructing a testing framework based on those requirements, performance of the tests with vendor support, and evaluation of the test results versus expectations, as well as subsequent recommendations.