A tool for exporting data from OCPI platforms
A lot of parties are interested in data on charging station usage. These parties range from public bodies to research institutions to commercial business analysis firms.
To get access to this data, they often request custom APIs to be developed by Charge Point Operators (CPOs), or request direct access to the CPO’s database systems. These methods work, but they have serious drawbacks. They amount to a lot of extra work for the CPO’s IT staff and make it easy for sensitive personally identifiable data to be over-shared.
This tool aims to enable CPOs to run easy, secure data exports from their OCPI interface.
While doing a full OCPI integration with a data consumer is a lot of work on their end as well, this tool will enable CPOs to easily create scripts that use the OCPI interface as a source for an ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) pipeline that can deliver properly cleaned and formatted data to external parties.
The advantage of the tool for the data consumer is that they can receive data in whatever custom format they ask from the CPO, and they don’t have to do a full OCPI integration or any other programmatic integration with the CPO. The advantage of the tool for the CPO is that they don’t have to add new interfaces to their core systems for new types of data exports; instead they can use the existing OCPI interface, avoiding tight-coupling their data exports to their business logic.
The tool is Open Source and can be used and modified by everyone and we hope that many companies will use and improve the tool, so that together we can create a better way of data sharing.
The data collection tool including examples can be found via this link
Tariffs are one of the most difficult items in protocols. This is mainly caused by the wish to support all possible different tariffs and tariff setups that companies want to use.
The main issues are:
- Specifications are up for interpretation by the reader
- MSP platforms need to understand all received tariffs
- CPO platforms need to publish tariffs as intended
- There’s no open and free reference implementation
To help organisations with this Tandemdrive with support of the EVRoaming foundation created a free command line-based tool.
It has the following features:
- Validate costs specified in a CDR
- Calculate the subtotals per dimension
- Provide insight into how the subtotal was calculated
Everyone can download and use this free tool. We hope that this will help companies and improve OCPI tariff implementations.