Utilities provide an essential service, supplying electricity to homes, businesses, and factories and monitoring the consumption of individual customers, capturing data to further develop their services. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, however, many European companies have reported that financial losses due to fraud (estimated at up to 5 percent of the company’s annual profit) are on the rise as fraud techniques have become increasingly sophisticated in identifying companies’ weaknesses.
As a result of this trend, there has been an increase in the imbalance between energy billed and energy supplied, termed “non-technical losses” to differentiate it from technical losses related to power grid malfunctions. Actual methods of committing fraud include:
- Tampering with the meter and connection to the riser (this is a modification that is made inside the meter: the contacts that register the absorption are opened and welded).
- Direct connections to the network before the meter to bypass it.
- Tampering with the meter to slow down or stop the consumption through a magnet.
- Simply by connecting to the distribution network without having a contract with the company or a meter.
For these reasons, A2A is looking for proven software systems that can model the consumer’s energy consumption behavior under normal conditions and monitoring it to detect anomalies that indicate fraudulent activity, achieving a higher detection rate than current methodology.
Competition Benefits
The winner of this competition will receive a $30,000 cash prize
Eligibility
Everyone is invited to submit a solution except employers of A2A
How To Apply
You apply by signing up to Wazoku and creating a solver profile. You can then be granted access to the submission link.
Submission Deadline
3 February 2023
