Welcome to PowerDale

PowerDale is a small town with around 100 residents. Most houses have a smart meter installed that can save and send information about how much power a house is drawing/using.

There are three major providers of energy in town that charge different amounts for the power they supply.

  • Dr Evil's Dark Energy
  • The Green Eco
  • Power for Everyone

Introducing JOI Energy

JOI Energy is a new start-up in the energy industry. Rather than selling energy they want to differentiate themselves from the market by recording their customers' energy usage from their smart meters and recommending the best supplier to meet their needs.

You have been placed into their development team, whose current goal is to produce an API which their customers and smart meters will interact with.

Unfortunately, two members of the team are on annual leave, and another one has called in sick! You are left with another ThoughtWorker to progress with the current user stories on the story wall. This is your chance to make an impact on the business, improve the code base and deliver value.

Story Wall

At JOI energy the development team use a story wall or Kanban board to keep track of features or "stories" as they are worked on.

The wall you will be working from today has 7 columns:

  • Backlog
  • Ready for Dev
  • In Dev
  • Ready for Testing
  • In Testing
  • Ready for sign off
  • Done

Examples can be found here https://leankit.com/learn/kanban/kanban-board/

Users

To trial the new JOI software 5 people from the JOI accounts team have agreed to test the service and share their energy data.

User Smart Meter ID Power Supplier
Sarah smart-meter-0 Dr Evil's Dark Energy
Peter smart-meter-1 The Green Eco
Charlie smart-meter-2 Dr Evil's Dark Energy
Andrea smart-meter-3 Power for Everyone
Alex smart-meter-4 The Green Eco

These values are used in the code and in the following examples too.

Requirements

The project requires Python 3.12 or higher and the Poetry package manager.

Useful Python commands

Installation

After installing poetry, install the project dependencies with:

poetry install --with ci,tests

This will install main dependencies together with optional ones. For more information see optional groups settings.

Run the tests

Run all tests

poetry run pytest

Run the application

Run the application which will be listening on port 8020.

poetry run python app.py

Pre-commit hooks

The project is offering pre-commit hooks, please install them via

pre-commit install

GitHub Actions

Each commit in the main branch will trigger a pipeline which will run unit tests and different linting tools. When successful it will also containerize the application, finally its scans the docker image for vulnerabilities with Trivy.

Building Docker Image

The application can be containerized by using:

docker build -t joy-energy .

Building Docker image

Once the docker image is built, it can be run with:

docker run -p 8020:8020 joy-energy

API

Below is a list of API endpoints with their respective input and output. Please note that the application needs to be running for the following endpoints to work. For more information about how to run the application, please refer to run the application section above.

Autogenerated documentations

The application will automatically generate documentations and provide them under:

Store Readings

Endpoint

POST /readings/store

Example of body

{
  "smartMeterId": <smartMeterId>,
  "electricityReadings": [
    {
      "time": <timestamp>,
      "reading": <reading>
    }
  ]
}

Parameters

Parameter Description
smartMeterId One of the smart meters' id listed above
time The date/time (as epoch) when the reading was taken
reading The consumption in kW at the time of the reading

Example readings

Date (GMT) Epoch timestamp Reading (kW)
2020-11-29 8:00 1606636800 0.0503
2020-11-29 8:01 1606636860 0.0621
2020-11-29 8:02 1606636920 0.0222
2020-11-29 8:03 1606636980 0.0423
2020-11-29 8:04 1606637040 0.0191

In the above example, the smart meter sampled readings, in kW, every minute. Note that the reading is in kW and not kWH, which means that each reading represents the consumption at the reading time. If no power is being consumed at the time of reading, then the reading value will be 0. Given that 0 may introduce new challenges, we can assume that there is always some consumption, and we will never have a 0 reading value. These readings are then sent by the smart meter to the application using REST. There is a service in the application that calculates the kWH from these readings.

The following POST request, is an example request using CURL, sends the readings shown in the table above.

curl \
  -X POST \
  -v \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "http://localhost:8020/readings/store" \
  -d '{"smartMeterId":"smart-meter-0","electricityReadings":[{"time":1606636800,"reading":0.0503},{"time":1606636860,"reading":0.0621},{"time":1606636920,"reading":0.0222},{"time":1606636980,"reading":0.0423},{"time":1606637040,"reading":0.0191}]}'

The above command will return the submitted readings.

{
  "electricityReadings": [
    {
      "reading": 0.0503,
      "time": 1606636800
    },
    {
      "reading": 0.0621,
      "time": 1606636860
    },
    {
      "reading": 0.0222,
      "time": 1606636920
    },
    {
      "reading": 0.0423,
      "time": 1606636980
    },
    {
      "reading": 0.0191,
      "time": 1606637040
    }
  ],
  "smartMeterId": "smart-meter-0"
}

Get Stored Readings

Endpoint

GET /readings/read/<smartMeterId>

Parameters

Parameter Description
smartMeterId One of the smart meters' id listed above

Retrieving readings using CURL

curl "http://localhost:8020/readings/read/smart-meter-0"

Example output

[
  {
    "reading": 0.0503,
    "time": 1606636800
  },
  {
    "reading": 0.0621,
    "time": 1606636860
  },
  {
    "reading": 0.0222,
    "time": 1606636920
  },
  {
    "reading": 0.0423,
    "time": 1606636980
  },
  {
    "reading": 0.0191,
    "time": 1606637040
  },
  {
    "reading": 0.988,
    "time": 989707945
  },
  {
    "reading": 0.402,
    "time": 992419009
  },
  {
    "reading": 0.785,
    "time": 1006196973
  },
  {
    "reading": 0.327,
    "time": 989837737
  },
  {
    "reading": 0.485,
    "time": 1003722501
  }
]

View Current Price Plan and Compare Usage Cost Against all Price Plans

Endpoint

GET /price-plans/compare-all/<smartMeterId>

Parameters

Parameter Description
smartMeterId One of the smart meters' id listed above

Retrieving readings using CURL

curl "http://localhost:8020/price-plans/compare-all/smart-meter-0"

Example output

{
  "pricePlanComparisons": [
    {
      "price-plan-2": 1.8573933524727018e-06
    },
    {
      "price-plan-1": 3.7147867049454036e-06
    },
    {
      "price-plan-0": 1.8573933524727016e-05
    }
  ],
  "pricePlanId": "price-plan-0"
}

View Recommended Price Plans for Usage

Endpoint

GET /price-plans/recommend/<smartMeterId>[?limit=<limit>]

Parameters

Parameter Description
smartMeterId One of the smart meters' id listed above
limit (Optional) limit the number of plans to be displayed

Retrieving readings using CURL

curl "http://localhost:8020/price-plans/recommend/smart-meter-0?limit=2"

Example output

[
  {
    "price-plan-2": 1.8573933524727018e-06
  },
  {
    "price-plan-1": 3.7147867049454036e-06
  }
]