Automatic meter error detection with a data-driven approach

Abstract

Meter error is one of the main contributing factors to unexpected fuel losses or gains in storage tanks at service stations. Although fuel dispensers are expected to be calibrated to standard accuracy periodically to ensure fair and reliable trade in the fuel market, some fuel retailers are unable to keep up with the standards. The current industry practice relies on onsite inspection to identify the issue, which leads to a cost burden if inspections are scheduled too frequently. To the best of our knowledge, there is no previously reported research tailored to the remote meter error detection problem. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for remote and automatic meter error detection via a data-driven approach based on inventory data and fuel transaction data. Specifically, we propose to use mean shift change point detection methods, including statistical-based as well as deep learning-based methods (LSTM-VAE, VAE, Kernel learning), to approach the problem. We present results on our data sets containing both real-world and simulated meter error data, and further evaluate these methods on several widely-used benchmark datasets, to assess their validity, advantages and limitations. The obtained results show that LSTM-VAE outperforms other models in most of the settings for the meter error dataset and the benchmark datasets.