Ideas for tidying up input format

[alexdewar]

I've been working on #530 and noticed a few inconsistencies/rough edges in the input format. I'll make a list here.

General

• Users can use stupid values for IDs -- e.g. "", "all" etc. -- and we should prohibit this (Prohibit reserved values for IDs #548)

Time slices

• In time_slices.csv time slices are specified with season and time of day in separate columns. It would be cleaner if they were just in the same form as in the other files, i.e. a time_slice column with values like winter.day
• We use the column heading time_slice sometimes to mean a TimeSliceID and sometimes to mean a TimeSliceSelection. Maybe we should rename in the case of the latter? E.g., time_slice_range, time_range etc.
• We currently allow users to input an empty string to represent the whole year for a time slice selection (i.e. the same as annual). This isn't clear and we shouldn't allow it.

"Maybes":

• annual sounds like it means once a year, rather than the whole year

Agents

• There are various parameters related to unused decision rules (weighted and lexico). We could remove all these for now

[alexdewar]

@tsmbland This discussion is a bit stale (we've implemented some of the suggestions), but I think there are a couple we could still do:

• Have a time_slice column in time_slices.csv cf. separate season and time_of_day ones
• Don't use time_slice as the name for columns which can take a TimeSliceSelection. Maybe we should rename it to time_range (and the data type to TimeRange while we're at it)

What do you think?

[tsmbland]

I don't really have a strong opinion about either of these, but my tendency would probably be to leave both as they are for now:

• Separate season/time_of_day columns, so it's clear that timeslices have to have a season and time of day
• time_slice as the column name just so there aren't so many different terms that users have to remember. On that note though, I was thinking that it might be good to allow some aliases (e.g. "timeslice" instead of "time_slice", "year" instead of "years"), just to be a bit less restrictive and annoying for users. (Or we could raise a "Did you mean...?" error)