A comprehensive review of global advanced metering infrastructure cost-benefit evidence and a data-integration framework for master-metered high-voltage apartment complexes

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is the core sensing layer of decarbonizing grids, but its value is realized only where interval data reach the grid operator and the tariff setter. This review synthesizes three separate literatures: the functional evolution of metering; cross-national AMI cost-benefit analyses (CBAs) covering Europe, Japan and South Korea; and data governance in master-metered multi-occupancy buildings. Deconstructing CBA formulations shows that only labor substitution accrues directly from meter installation; every other benefit category depends on coefficients that require data reachability. This helps account for the order-of-magnitude dispersion in benefit–cost ratios, which is associated more closely with the evaluation boundary and complementary institutions than with technology cost, and exposes a structural vulnerability in South Korea. Deployment reached 20 million low-voltage customers in 2024 (B/C 1.03), yet the 11.96 million households in 28,253 high-voltage apartment complexes largely sit outside the metering data pipeline: the complex, not the household, is the contracting customer, and household meters are private assets behind the supply point. AMI hardware reaches 53% of these households but only 15.4% (1.84 million) are linked to the utility, leaving 4.5 million households whose interval data reach a private server and go no further. The exclusion became binding in 2026, when residential time-of-use (TOU) tariffs were deferred nationally for want of AMI coverage. Japan’s Specified Metering (IoT-route) system, Australia’s embedded networks and North American master metering show that such arrangements can be made useful without dissolving supply contracts. We propose a conceptual, hypothesis-generating architecture for an apartment-dedicated meter data management system (APT-MDMS) with gateway-based integration, server-side TOU settlement, a consent and privacy architecture, and a five-year, four-segment roadmap. The proposed architecture and roadmap are design hypotheses whose system interfaces, reliability, costs and economic viability require pilot validation.