KohlrAHBi

Kohlrahbi generates machine-readable files from AHB documents.

Rationale

German utilities exchange data using EDIFACT; This is called market communication (mako). The Forum Datenformate of the BDEW publishes the technical regulations of the EDIFACT based market communication on edi-energy.de. These rules are not stable but change twice a year (in theory) or few times per year (in reality).

Specific rules, which are binding for every German utility are kind of formalised in so called "Anwendungshandbüchern" (AHB). Those AHBs are basically long tables that describe:

As a utility, if I want to exchange data about business process XYZ with a market partner, then I have to provide the following information: [...]

In total the regulations from these Anwendungshandbücher span several thousand pages. And by pages, we really mean pages. EDIFACT communication is basically the API between German utilities for most of their B2B processes. However, the technical specifications of this API are

• prose
• on DIN A4 pages.

The Anwendungshandbücher are the epitome of digitization with some good intentions.

Although the AHBs are publicly available as PDF or Word files on edi-energy.de, they are hardly accessible in a technical sense:

• You cannot automatically extract information from the AHBs.
• You cannot run automatic comparisons between different versions.
• You cannot automatically test your own API against the set of rules, described in the AHBs (as prose).
• You cannot view or visualize the information from the AHBs in any more intuitive or practical way, than the raw tables from the AHB files.
• ...any many more...

The root cause for all these inaccessibility is a technical one: Information that are theoretically structured are published in an unstructured format (PDF or Word), which is not suited for technical specifications in IT.

KohlrAHBi as a tool helps you to break those chains and access the AHBs as you'd expect it from technical specs: easy and automatically instead of with hours of mindless manual work.

KohlrAHBi takes the .docx files published by edi-energy.de as an input and returns truly machine-readable data in a variety of formats (JSON, CSV...) as a result.

Hence, KohlrAHBi is the key for unlocking any automation potential that is reliant on information hidden in the Anwendungshandbücher.

We're all hoping for the day of true digitization on which this repository will become obsolete.

Installation

Kohlrahbi is a Python based tool. Therefor you have to make sure, that Python is running on your machine.

We recommend to use virtual environments to keep your system clean.

Create a new virtual environment with

python -m venv .venv

The activation of the virtual environment depends on your used OS.

Windows

.venv\Scripts\activate

MacOS/Linux

source .venv/bin/activate

Finally, install the package with

pip install kohlrahbi

Usage

There are two ways to use kohlrahbi.

1. You can extract all prüfidentifikatoren listed in all_known_pruefis.toml,
2. or you can extract a specific prüfidentifikator.

Get all Prüfidentifikatoren

If you want to extract all prüfidentifikatoren, you can run the following command. For the following steps we assume that you cloned our edi_energy_mirror to a neighbouring directory.

kohlrahbi --input_path ../edi_energy_mirror/edi_energy_de/current --output_path ./output/ --file-type flatahb

This will extract all prüfidentifikatoren listed in all_known_pruefis.toml and save them in the provided output path.

.docx Data Sources

kohlrahbi internally relies on a specific naming schema of the .docx files in which the file name holds information about the edifact format and validity period of the AHBs contained within the file. The easiest way to be compliant with this naming schema is to clone our edi_energy_mirror repository to your localhost.

Get a specific Prüfidentifikator

If you want to extract a specific prüfidentifikator, you can run the following command.

kohlrahbi --input_path ../edi_energy_mirror/edi_energy_de/current --output_path ./output/ --pruefis 13002 --file-type xlsx

You can also provide multiple prüfidentifikatoren.

kohlrahbi --input_path ../edi_energy_mirror/edi_energy_de/current --output_path ./output/ --pruefis 13002 --pruefis 13003 --pruefis 13005 --file-type csv

Results

There is a kohlrahbi based CI pipeline from the edi_energy_mirror mentioned above to the repository machine-readable_anwendungshandbuecher where you can find scraped AHBs as JSON, CSV or Excel files.

Export ConditionKeys and ConditionTexts

For example to export condition.json files to edi_energy_ahb_conditions_and_packages. Works best if no flags for "Prüfindentifikatoren" (--pruefis). In this case all known "Prüfidentifikatoren" are scanned. Thus all related conditions are gathered.

kohlrahbi --file-type conditions --input_path ../edi_energy_mirror/edi_energy_de/current --output_path ./output/edi_energy_ahb_conditions_and_packages/aktuelleFV

Workflow

flowchart TB
    S[Start] --> RD[Read docx]
    RD --> RPT[Read all paragraphs <br> and tables]
    RPT --> I[Start iterating]
    I --> NI[Read next item]
    %% check for text paragraph %%
    NI --> CTP{Text Paragraph?}
    CTP -- Yes --> NI
    CTP -- No --> CCST{Is item just<br>Chapter or Section Title?}
    CCST -- Yes --> CTAenderunghistorie{Is Chapter Title<br>'Änderungshistorie'?}
    CTAenderunghistorie -- Yes --> EXPORT[Export Extract]
    CCST -- No --> CT{Is item a table<br>with prüfis?}
    CT -- Yes --> Extract[Create Extract]

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Development

Setup

To set up the development environment, you have to install the dev dependencies.

tox -e dev

Run all tests and linters

To run the tests, you can use tox.

tox

See our Python Template Repository for detailed explanations.

Contribute

You are very welcome to contribute to this template repository by opening a pull request against the main branch.

Related Tools and Context

This repository is part of the Hochfrequenz Libraries and Tools for a truly digitized market communication.