Scalable Metering and Monitoring Solution
IAMUS – Scalable Metering and Monitoring Solution Built on ThingsBoard
Overview
IAMUS is a Lithuanian-developed remote metering platform for water, heat, and utility infrastructure, designed to serve both large-scale municipalities and smaller local utility providers. Our solution is currently used by major clients such as AB Vilniaus silumos tinklai (AB Vilnius Heat Networks), managing over 300,000 meters, and expanding to multiple regional service providers.
Why ThingsBoard:
A Flexible Core for Specialized Needs
We chose ThingsBoard as the foundation for IAMUS primarily for its exceptional flexibility and robust core architecture. Its generic entity structure was critical, providing the adaptability needed to
model diverse utility assets without restriction. Equally important were its reliable, standard IoT protocol endpoints (MQTT, HTTP), providing stable targets for data ingestion. Its scalability, realtime telemetry support, powerful rule engine, extensible UI framework, and comprehensive API access provided the versatile toolkit needed to build around and on top of the platform. This allowed
us to focus our efforts on specialized aspects like data preparation and user experience.
Why Choose Iamus Smart Metering??
IAMUS leverages ThingsBoard’s core strengths while adding specialized layers to meet specific utility requirements:
Enhanced Multi-vendor Metering Integration:
We handle the complexity of diverse metering protocols (OMS, M-Bus, LoRa, NB-IoT, direct device APIs) by developing custom upstream data parsers. These parsers normalize data and handle protocol-specific edge cases before publishing standardized telemetry messages to ThingsBoard’s reliable MQTT or HTTP endpoints. This approach maximizes compatibility without altering the core platform.
Streamlined Data Management:
Once standardized data reaches ThingsBoard, we utilize its powerful Rule Engine for automated validation, filtering, raising alerts (like for inactive meters or communication failures), and triggering workflows like object creation from CSV/XLS bulk imports.
Tailored User Experiences:
We leverage ThingsBoard’s UI customization features to build tailored analytics dashboards and interfaces, specifically adapted to different client roles (administrators, billing departments, service technicians), offering much more than standard generic views.
Seamless Ecosystem Integration:
We leverage ThingsBoard’s REST APIs to build extensions that ensure smooth data flow between IAMUS and essential external systems like billing platforms and municipal software.
Deployment Models
Depending on the client’s needs, IAMUS offers on-premise or cloud deployments, fully maintaining the high security and data ownership standards required by public infrastructure operators.
Results
Thanks to the solid ThingsBoard foundation, complemented by our specialized development, IAMUS delivers:
- Up to 50% OPEX savings in meter data management
- Real-time visibility of over 300,000+ devices
- Greater transparency and adaptability for utility providers of all sizes
Conclusion
By leveraging ThingsBoard’s flexible engine – particularly its generic entities, UI framework, standard data ingestion endpoints, and APIs – and complementing it with our domain expertise in developing specialized data parsers and tailored interfaces, IAMUS created a highly adaptable, production-grade metering platform. This use case demonstrates how ThingsBoard’s core strengths can be effectively extended to meet complex, real-world industry challenges.