Idea & need
Project supported by PRé Consultants, since January 2007, as member of the Funding Consortium.
Project supported by PE International GmbH, since March 2007, as new member of the Funding Consortium. Welcome!
The Green Standard has funded integration of data in Earthster and openLCA, in order to enable manufacturers who are doing LCA to publish, share, and use life cycle results with suppliers and customers, and purchasers to have access to better information that helps them to purchase more sustainably.
Format converter project supported by the SETAC/UNEP Life Cycle Initiative, as commissioned project. We are excited about this support since it will allow establishing a long-term oriented strategy for the converter and its maintenance.
Format converter and format converter API supported by bmbf, by Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH, Institut für Angewandte Informatik (FZK / IAI), and by the German Network on Life Cycle Inventory Data, April 2007 - August 2007.
Welcome to the project website of openLCA!
The openLCA project will create, in the coming 1.5 years, a modular software for life cycle analysis and sustainability assessments. The software will be available as open source, and will be available for free.
Initially, a basic framework for life cycle assessment (LCA) calculation and two plugins will be implemented, a format converter and an uncertainty module. The format converter serves to convert relevant LCA data formats from one to the other, in a loss-less manner. The uncertainty module will help to specify, calculate, visualise and interprete uncertainty in LCA product systems.
This site provides you an overview of the project; you are invited to browse through background information and to say your opinion; you might be interested to join, as a tester, contributor, or funder - and we are keen to explain why you should! You will also find download resources, and some words about us. We expect the site to grow with project schedule - you are invited to join the project newsletter to stay informed.
Beta 1.0 of the openLCA Framework released
After nearly two years of hard work, openLCA is available in a Beta 1.0 version, as free open source software, for modelling and assessing Life Cycle Assessments (as first start!), with various import and export options, and with a help for clarifying some questions.
The software is available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openlca. The source code is the '[...]src.zip' package with 'src'; the compiled application is in '[...]bin.zip'
This release is for Windows (2000 or higher), a version for Linux is in preparation and will be publicly available soon as well (by now available on request).
- Download section in the sourceforge site
- Packages available for openLCA Framework Beta 1.0
HOW TO START: For the compiled version ([...]bin.zip), simply download and unzip the zip package, while preserving the directory structure (see also the picture on the right), and start openLCA.exe.
REQUIREMENTS: You will need a Java Runtime Environment 1.6 or higher, and your firewall should allow both the application (openLCA) and the database (mySQL) to start - that's it.
It was quite a busy time, and we have done our best to provide a user friendly, useful, and nice piece of software - we look forward to any feedback you may have. And thanks, by the way, for those who supported us already during the testing phase, with questions, ideas, and bug-reports, and big thanks to our Funding Consortium! I think without them we would not have started the whole project - more information, also on next steps, here on the project website.
Release is approaching!
Well finally, you might say.. we are to release the openLCA application for free, as announced amply here on the site and also elsewhere. We plan with next week; last things to do are finetuning the help files, and looking into an additional Mac release. Stay tuned..
The release will also be an opportunity to upgrade this site - let's see how far we get. As appetizer, we attach here a recent screenshot; we tried the new autocomplete feature of openLCA on a wind power plant unit process from ecoinvent V. 2 - and received the largest system we had ever to handle so far. The autocomplete feature completes a system by following links from one process to others. Expect some other features also new for the testers (and introduced based on testing feedback): Projects to compare options, a meta search, an integrated, searchable help, configurable imports that can deal with new /unknown units in files, a matrix export, different icons for categories and options, ...) - more later!
openLCA Framework is out for testing!
March 17, 2008. Last week the openLCA framework, as a modular framework for modelling life cycle assessments, was released for testing to several insitutions worldwide, including, of course, the Funding Consortium of the openLCA project (PRé Consultants and PE International). Other institutions are: CML Leiden; Univ. Berkeley; EPFL Lausanne; Harvard School of Public Health; Sylvatica (Montréal); Univ. Wuppertal; Joint Research Centre of the European Commission; Centre de Ressources des Technologies pour l'Environnement (CRTE) Luxembourg. The initial test phase is set for four weeks, so we look forward to test results by beginning of April. While the test application is not available for all at the moment, you can have a glance at the testing guide here (pdf, 5 MB).
This news means also that we approach release of the application framework - as you may guess we are open for any ideas what we should include!
Note on March 19: The Rocky Mountain Institute has also joined for testing. Welcome!
Note on March 27: Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Institute of Applied Informatics, joined as well - Welcome!
April 2: CIRAIG, the Interuniversity Research Centre for the Life Cycle of Products, Processes and Services, at Montréal, has also joined - welcome to Canada!
News - Int J LCA announces openLCA, new converter issue forthcoming
June 12, 2007: We are excited that the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment announces in its current issue the openLCA project. For details please refer to the Journal's website, or download the announcement from the download area. Comments, as always, welcome!
A new version of the format converter is forthcoming; as major improvement, it will consider metadocuments from previous format conversions. As a result, converting e.g. from ELCD format to EcoSpold and back produces almost the original file; almost, because the converter cuts off links to external documents which would otherwise be needed to be carried along with the exchanged process data set. The converter section contains some new screenshots that should give you an idea. Members of the funding consortium have already received this new converter version.