KohlrAHBi

Kohlrahbi generates machine-readable files from AHB documents. Kohlrahbi's sister is MIG_mose.

If you'd like to create a nice diff view of AHBs in different versions, try ahlbatross.

If you're looking for a tool to process the official BDEW XMLs for AHBs (available since 2024), checkout fundamend.

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. Therefore 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

Kohlrahbi is a command line tool. You can use it in three different ways:

1. Extract AHB tables for all prüfidentifikatoren or a specific prüfidentifikator of a provided format version.
2. Extract all conditions for each format of a provided format version.
3. Extract the change history of a provided format version.

You can run the following command to get an overview of all available commands and options.

kohlrahbi --help

Note

For the following steps we assume that you cloned our edi_energy_mirror to a neighbouring directory. The edi_energy_mirror contains the .docx files of the AHBs. The folder structure should look like this:

.
├── edi_energy_mirror
└── kohlrahbi

Extract AHB table

To extract the all AHB tables for each pruefi of a specific format version, you can run the following command.

kohlrahbi ahb --edi-energy-mirror-path ../edi_energy_mirror/ --output-path ./output/ --file-type csv --format-version FV2310

To extract the AHB tables for a specific pruefi of a specific format version, you can run the following command.

kohlrahbi ahb -eemp ../edi_energy_mirror/ --output-path ./output/ --file-type csv --pruefis 13002 --format-version FV2310

You can also provide multiple pruefis.

kohlrahbi ahb -eemp ../edi_energy_mirror/ --output-path ./output/ --file-type csv --pruefis 13002 --pruefis 13003 --pruefis 13005 --format-version FV2310

And you can also provide multiple file types.

kohlrahbi ahb -eemp ../edi_energy_mirror/ --output-path ./output/ --file-type csv --file-type xlsx --file-type flatahb --pruefis 13002 --format-version FV2310

Extract all conditions

To extract all conditions for each format of a specific format version, you can run the following command.

kohlrahbi conditions -eemp ../edi_energy_mirror/ --output-path ./output/ --format-version FV2310

This will provide you with:

• all conditions
• all packages

found in all AHBs (including the condition texts from package tables) within the specified folder with the .docx files. The output will be saved for each Edifact format separately as conditions.json and packages.json in the specified output path. Please note that the information regarding the conditions collected here may more comprehensive compared to the information collected for the AHBs above. This is because conditions uses a different routine than ahb.

Extract change history

kohlrahbi changehistory -eemp ../edi_energy_mirror/ --output-path ./output/ --format-version FV2310

.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.

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.

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]

Loading

AHB page number per Format

The following table shows the page number of the AHBs for each format of the format version FV2310.

Format	Page number	Hint
UTILMD Strom	1064
UTILMD Gas	345
REQOTE	264	together with QUOTES, ORDERS, ORDRSP, ORDCHG
QUOTES	264	together with REQOTE, ORDERS, ORDRSP, ORDCHG
ORDRSP	264	together with REQOTE, QUOTES, ORDERS, ORDCHG
ORDERS	264	together with REQOTE, QUOTES, ORDRSP, ORDCHG
ORDCHG	264	together with REQOTE, QUOTES, ORDERS, ORDRSP
MSCONS	164
UTILMD MaBis	133
REMADV	91	together with INVOIC
INVOIC	91	together with REMADV
IFTSTA	82
CONTRL	72	together with APERAK, contains no Prüfis
APERAK	72	together with CONTRL, contains no Prüfis
PARTIN	69
UTILTS	34
ORDRSP	30	together with ORDERS
ORDERS	30	together with ORDRSP
PRICAT	25
COMDIS	10	good test for tables which are above change history

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.