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 energy a house has used.

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 (formerly EcoMart) is a 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 in a small support team along with 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 support team are on annual leave, and another one has called in sick! You are left with another ThoughtWorker to support the application and provide value to the client by having minimum/no disruptions in the application

Problem Statement

The immediate challenge is to increase the stability of the application by maintaining and improving the code base while in parallel the development of the API for customer and smart meter interaction is ongoing

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.

Overview

JOI Energy is a new energy company that uses data to ensure customers are able to be on the best price plan for their energy consumption.

API

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

Store Readings

Endpoint

POST /readings/store

Example of body

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

Parameters

Parameter	Description
smartMeterId	One of the smart meters' id listed above
time	The time when the delta is measured
reading	The delta reading since the last reading

Example readings

Date (GMT)	Reading (kW)
2020-11-11T08:00:00.0000000+00:00	0.0503
2020-11-12T08:00:00.0000000+00:00	0.0213

In the above example, 0.0213 kW where consumed between 2020-11-11 8:00 and 2020-11-12 8:00.

Posting readings using CURL

$ curl \
  -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "http://localhost:5000/readings/store" \
  -d '{"smartMeterId":"smart-meter-0","electricityReadings":[{"time":"2020-11-11T08:00:00.0000000+00:00","reading":0.0503},{"time":"2020-11-12T08:00:00.0000000+00:00","reading":0.0213}]}'

The above command returns 200 OK and {}.

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:5000/readings/read/smart-meter-0"

Example output

[
  { "time": "2020-11-11T08:00:00.000000Z", "reading": 0.0503 },
  { "time": "2020-11-12T08:00:00.000000Z", "reading": 0.0213 },
  ...
]

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:5000/price-plans/compare-all/smart-meter-0"

Example output

{
  "DrEvilsDarkEnergy": 94.87181867550794,
  "TheGreenEco": 18.974363735101587,
  "PowerForEveryone": 9.487181867550794
}

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:5000/price-plans/recommend/smart-meter-0?limit=2"

Example output

[
  {
    "key": "PowerForEveryone",
    "value": 9.487181867550794
  },
  {
    "key": "TheGreenEco",
    "value": 18.974363735101587
  }
]

Requirements

The project requires .NET 6.0.

Compatible IDEs

Tested on:

• Visual Studio 2022 (17.1)
• Visual Studio for Mac (8.10)
• Visual Studio Code (1.64)

Useful commands

From the terminal/shell/command line tool, use the following commands to build, test and run the API.

Build the project

$ dotnet build

Run the tests

$ dotnet test JOIEnergy.Tests

Run the application

Run the application which will be listening on port 5000.

$ dotnet run --project JOIEnergy