Algorithm pipelines

[zach401]

• Modify algorithms to use a pipeline based approach to pre and post processing.
• Introduce new SessionInfo and InfrastructureInfo objects to store data.
• Change algorithm interface to provide algorithm with SessionInfo objects rather than EV objects, ensuring they are read-only.

[sunash]

Some notes on this PR:

• We'd like to refactor the Interface to use only the InfrastructureInfo and SessionInfo objects so that the ACN-Live Interface need only re-implement infrastructure_info and session_info. This raises some issues:

  • infrastructure_info is called at the beginning of almost every Interface function accessing network attributes. I'll profile this and see if construction/validation of the object with each call slows down the Simulator. If it does, we'll discuss caching the Infrastructure info object
  • is_feasible currently calls the ChargingNetwork is_feasible function. We'd like is_feasible in the interface to be reusable in the ACN-Live interface, so all the logic of is_feasible should be accessible independently of the details of the underlying network. Since within the Simulator, ChargingNetwork still needs access to is_feasible, we'll probably put is_feasible into a utility package so that both Interface and ChargingNetwork can access it. This raises the issue of other implementations of is_feasible for other network types, but if this is an issue, users can always reimplement Interface and ChargingNetwork to use a new utility function for is_feasible.

• infrastructure_info needs to return a copy of the created InfrastructureInfo object, in case an external caller modifies it (as some of the algorithm pipelines do). We'll use _infrastructure_info internally to generate the object, and copy and return it in infrastructure_info.

[sunash]

Just a heads up, for algorithms/tests, the tests directory needs an init file for it to be discoverable by unittest. When I add this file, some of the algorithms tests fail.

[sunash]

LGTM 🚀