ACES-Volttime

Volttime enables running a VOLTTRON experiment/simulation at a specific but arbitrary date, hour, minute, second and at faster or slower than actual time.

This example setup assumes you know how to build and install volttron agents and have a basic understanding of the Volttron Driver Framework

VOLTTRON Installation Please follow the steps at http://volttron.readthedocs.io/en/master/install.html

Requirements

Volttron Platform compatible with the driver framework
pandas; you can get it by sourcing the volttron environment and pip install pandas

This repository has two sets of agents: the core agents which enable using Volttime and an example agents which shows how to interact with these agents.

Core Agents:

Volttime Agent :

This agent can be configured to publish Volttime at different rates.

Actuator Agent:

This agent is a modified version of the ActuatorAgent available in Volttron. This agent uses Volttime as the main time server. This agent enables using Volttime in the VOLTTRON driver framework. The VIP IDENTITY of this agent is platform.d.actuator

Example Agent:

Test agent:

This agent has examples of scheduling the fake device provided with VOLTTRON and setting a value on it. This works based on the updated Volttime.

Note:

Test agent needs a few extra lines of code to enable it to sync with Volttime.

Subscribing to Volttime

Volttime will be used as the timeserver for the agents that would like to run in the simulated time.

    @PubSub.subscribe('pubsub', 'datalogger/log/volttime')
    def match_all(self, peer, sender, bus, topic, headers, message):
        '''
            Subscribe to volttime and synchronize
        '''
        str_time = message['timestamp']['Readings']

        volttime = time.strptime(str_time, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
        volttime = dt.fromtimestamp(mktime(volttime))
        self.volttime = pytz.utc.localize(volttime)

Building/Installing the agents:

This repo has a Makefile to help with the agent installation, you can use your own setup if you prefer:

Please set your VOLTTRON_HOME environment variable before using this Makefile. Make sure the platform is up and running before you make the agents.

volttron-ctl log&  
make all

# add the configuration store for the modified actuator agent
volttron-ctl config store platform.d.actuator schedule_state_file platform.d.actuator

Build the master driver agent configured with the fake device;

The Master driver can be found here : volttron/services/core/MasterDriverAgent in the main VOLTTRON repo
The configuration files for the Fake device can be found here : volttron/examples/configurations/drivers in the main VOLTTRON repo

Volttime

Agent setup

The start-time, stop-time and the rate at which this time would be published can be controlled by the settings.py file.

VTIME_START = "2013-07-01 18:00:00" #Simulation start time
VTIME_STOP = "2013-07-02 18:00:00" # simulation stop time
HEARTBEAT_PERIOD = 1.0 # Simulation rate

Here's an example of what the Volttime message from this agent looks like:

Peer: 'pubsub', Sender: 'volttimeagent-3.0_2':, Bus: u'', Topic: 'datalogger/log/volttime',\
Headers: {'Date': '2017-04-25 14:01:10.684195+00:00Z', 'max_compatible_version': u'', \
'min_compatible_version': '3.0', 'AgentID': 'Volt_time', 'Content-Type': 'text/plain'},\
Message: {'timestamp': {'Units': 'ts', 'Readings': '2013-07-01 18:02:56'}}

Example setup

Please make sure the Platform is up and running
volttron -vv -l volttron.log&
Start the Master driver agent configured with the fake device.
Start the Modified Actuator Agent volttron-ctl start --tag actuator-v
Start the TestAgent volttron-ctl start --tag test-v
Start the Volttime agent volttron-ctl start --tag volttime
Please make sure you start the Volttime agent after all the other agents have been started
You can now tail the log file to see the progress
tail -f volttron.log

Feedback We apprecitate your feedback, Please use the GitHub issue tracker at https://github.com/NREL/volttime/issues

License

The project is licensed under a modified BSD license.