BattBot

An automated Battery Bot that tweets random battery configuration plots in the form of a GIF with the help of PyBaMM. The bot focuses on comparing 2 or 3 different configurations and can also reply to a simulation request. All the random tweeted configurations are stored in data.txt and the latest tweeted configuration is stored in config.txt that can also be played with on Google Colab here. Some examples for the simulation requests through a tweet are available here - REQUEST_EXAMPLES.md.

Deployment (The CI/CD pipeline)

One half of the bot is deployed on GitHub Actions and the other half is deployed on Heroku. The GitHub Actions deployment tweets random configurations at 7 am and 7 pm UTC whereas the Heroku deployment runs the script every minute to look out for tweet requests.

GitHub Actions is also responsible for running the tests, updating the stored random configurations, and keeping the run-simulations notebook in working condition (by updating the latest tweeted configuration in config.txt). The last_seen_id (ID of the tweet to which the bot replied last) is also synced on scheduled runs to keep the Heroku and GitHub Actions deployment in sync with each other.

Once everything in the Continuous Integration (GitHub Actions) part of the pipeline passes, the Continuous Deployment phase starts and the bot is deployed on Heroku, where it is built again with the updated last_seen_id (Heroku does not store the locally updated files permanently because of its ephemeral filesystem, another reason to update last_seen_id using GitHub Actions).

The files that keep Heroku deployment running -

• requirements.txt
• runtime.txt
• Procfile

The file that keeps GitHub Actions deployment running -

• python-app.yml

Random Tweets

• The random configuration is generated in config_generator.py, hence, all the new possible options in the future should be added in this file.
• This configuration is passed down to random_plot_generator which then calls different scripts based on if degradation is present in the configuration.
• Comparison plots (which are "model comparison" and "parameter comparison") with no degradation are generated in ComparisonGenerator
• The GIFs are created in create_gif.py and are resized using resize_gif.py to make them suitable for Twitter API.
• The GIFs are then finally tweeted out by the Tweet class.

Requested Tweets

• The replying functionality is a hybrid of tweepy and inbuilt python libraries requests and requests_oauthlib.
• The Reply class is responsible for reading the tweet requests and for creating a configuration from that tweet's text.
• This configuration is then passed down to random_plot_generator which now simulates and solves it (as it does with the random configuration).

Uploading and Replying (Twitter API)

• A GIF is uploaded and tweeted using the Upload class. It uploads a media file in chunks (keeping in mind Twitter API's time out) to a Twitter API's endpoint and then finally tweets it.
• Tweet and Reply classes inherit the Upload class to tweet random and user-requested GIFs.

Tests and coverage

The tests and the workflows are designed in a way that protects the Twitter API keys from getting revealed. The tests that require Twitter API keys to run, never run on a PR coming from a forked repository, as that would expose the API keys and anyone with a malicious script on that PR will be able to print/store/read them. More information on the structure of the test directory can be found here.

The bot uses a lot of multiprocessing calls (using a custom Process class) which makes the code coverage a bit unusual. The sitecustomize.py and .coveragerc files make sure that coverage is used to run tests in subprocesses. Complete documentation for this can be found here.

The coverage report on a PR coming from a fork will show that the coverage goes down (even if everything is covered) as some tests won't run on that PR as described above.

Citing PyBaMM

If you use PyBaMM in your work, please cite the paper

Sulzer, V., Marquis, S. G., Timms, R., Robinson, M., & Chapman, S. J. (2021). Python Battery Mathematical Modelling (PyBaMM). Journal of Open Research Software, 9(1).

You can use the bibtex

@article{Sulzer2021,
  title = {{Python Battery Mathematical Modelling (PyBaMM)}},
  author = {Sulzer, Valentin and Marquis, Scott G. and Timms, Robert and Robinson, Martin and Chapman, S. Jon},
  doi = {10.5334/jors.309},
  journal = {Journal of Open Research Software},
  publisher = {Software Sustainability Institute},
  volume = {9},
  number = {1},
  pages = {14},
  year = {2021}
}

To cite papers relevant to your code, you can add the following -

pybamm.print_citations()

to the end of your script. This will print bibtex information to the terminal; passing a filename to print_citations will print the bibtex information to the specified file instead. A list of all citations can also be found in the citations file.

Contributing to BattBot

All contributions to this repository are welcome. You can go through our contribution guidelines to make the whole process smoother.