Abstract: A commodity-meter management system including commodity meters (e.g., electrical energy meters, gas meters, and/or water meters), one or more servers, and a communications application to communicate between the meters and the servers. The meters are connected to the servers via communication mediums. The communications application can communicate bi-directionally in real-time between the meters and the servers via the communication mediums. The communications application can determine the actual configuration parameters according to which the meter is operating at any given time. In order to detect theft of a commodity, the communications application can compare the actual configuration parameters to default configuration parameters. If the actual and default configuration parameters are not equal, substantially equal, or within a predetermined threshold, the communications application indicates that a tamper event has occurred.

Abstract: A method of dispatching a plurality of electrical generation systems that are controlled by a central monitoring and control system. The central system determines the order in which the distributed generators are deployed based upon several variables, such as maintenance costs, operating costs, and operating performance. The determination of the start order is based upon a significant number of variables that vary from one make and model of generator to another. The system and method of the present invention utilizes fuzzy logic to determine the order in which the generators are dispatched based upon the multiple variables available.