A novel remote meter-reading system based on virtual instrument

In order to monitor the factory district energy automatically, decrease production cost, the Remote Meter Reading System(RMRS) is developed. Design of which uses virtual instrument software architecture, and all the meters with RS-485 interface are connected to enterprise information network through modules, which can invert RS-485 bus interface to Ethernet. The remote meter-reading software is developed under LabVIEW platform, Database is the core of application software, and information about the meters, classes and history data are connected to database. Using this architecture, it´s convenient to manage all the information. Test data is obtained by communication sub-program, which realize the 645 terms through virtual instrument software architecture. Finally functions such as remote meter-reading, system data management, software privilege, instrument alarm promp, report generation and print are realized. Field result shows that this system can not only provide the original data for energy analysis also can observe the trend of history curve.