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 using at a given point in time.

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 it 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.

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 Java 21. If you have multiple JVMs on your machine, you might want to consider using a tool such as sdkman or mise (amongst others) to handle switching between versions.

The project makes use of Gradle and uses the Gradle wrapper, which means you don't need Gradle installed.

Useful Gradle commands

List all Gradle tasks

List all the tasks that Gradle can run, such as build and test.

$ ./gradlew tasks

Build the project

Compiles the project, runs the test and then creates an executable JAR file

$ ./gradlew build

Run the application using Java and the executable JAR file produced by the Gradle build task. The application will be listening on port 8080.

$ java -jar build/libs/developer-joyofenergy-java.jar

Run the tests

There are two types of tests, the unit tests and the functional tests. These can be executed as follows.

• Run unit tests only

  $ ./gradlew test

• Run functional tests only

  $ ./gradlew functionalTest

• Run both unit and functional tests

  $ ./gradlew check

Run the application

Run the application which will be listening on port 8080.

$ ./gradlew bootRun

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.

Store Readings

Endpoint

POST /readings/store

Example of body

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

Parameters

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

Example readings

Date & Time (GMT/UTC)	Epoch timestamp (seconds)	Power 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 power readings, in kW, every minute. Note that the reading is in kW and not kWH, which means that each reading represents the power 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 the HTTP API.

There is a service in the application that calculates the energy used in kWH from these power readings over time.

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

$ curl \
  -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "http://localhost:8080/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 does not return anything beyond the HTTP 200 status.

Get Stored Readings

Endpoint:

GET /readings/read/<smartMeterId>

Parameters:

Parameter	Description
smartMeterId	One of the smart meter ids listed above.

Retrieving readings using curl:

$ curl "http://localhost:8080/readings/read/smart-meter-0"

Example output:

[
  {
    "time": "2020-11-29T08:00:00Z",
    "reading": 0.0503
  },
  {
    "time": "2020-11-29T08:01:00Z",
    "reading": 0.0621
  },
  {
    "time": "2020-11-29T08:02:00Z",
    "reading": 0.0222
  },
  {
    "time": "2020-11-29T08:03:00Z",
    "reading": 0.0423
  },
  {
    "time": "2020-11-29T08:04:00Z",
    "reading": 0.0191
  }
]

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 meter ids listed above.

Retrieving readings using curl:

$ curl "http://localhost:8080/price-plans/compare-all/smart-meter-0"

Example output:

{
  "pricePlanComparisons": {
    "price-plan-2": 0.0002,
    "price-plan-1": 0.0004,
    "price-plan-0": 0.002
  },
  "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 ids listed above.
limit	(Optional) limit the number of plans to be displayed.

Retrieving readings using curl:

$ curl "http://localhost:8080/price-plans/recommend/smart-meter-0?limit=2"

Example output:

[
  {
    "price-plan-2": 0.0002
  },
  {
    "price-plan-1": 0.0004
  }
]