Meterperson's Procedural Assistant

Pacific Gas and Electric

An expert system has been developed to assist personnel in the field with servicing and maintaining PG&E's electric revenue meters. The system provides the ability to quickly index and reference information pertaining to safety precautions, operating policies, diagnostics, testing and maintenance procedures. Conceptually, the meterperson's assistant is designed to provide the user with information on what to do next, where to get additional help or reference, what is important and why. It provides assistance to the user with the following metering tasks:

• Servicing and maintenance recommendations relating to equipment recalls
• Safety precautions
• Testing procedures on test setups and calculations
• Troubleshooting solutions based on the a history of the past performance of particular meters
• Reporting including special notes regarding each different type of meter

The meterperson's assistant system can also be used as a training tool because it can describe reasoning behind it's recommendations, and can make calls to external graphics programs for clarification when situations are difficult to describe with just text.