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Auflistung nach Autor:in "Srocka, Michael"

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  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Efficient Software support for Interpretation of Life Cycle Assessment Results - The LCA Evaluator
    (Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) Ciroth, Andreas; Srocka, Michael; Liu, Ran
    Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are increasingly recognised as a means to assess the environmental performance of products in a holistic and reliable manner, with increased use for supporting decisions in business and policy. LCAs typically provide information on product-related impacts in a variety of different (environmental) impact categories. When comparing the impacts of different products, then diverging results for single categories often cause problems in the interpretation. They require the consideration of trade-offs between impact categories to come to an overall conclusion, and thus require introducing value choices. The German EPA has developed a structured approach for the interpretation of LCA impact category results, intended to be applied by a panel of environmental experts. The approach introduces value choices stepwise into the interpretation procedure and comes to a conclusion with not more value choices than necessary, ensuring that the recommendation obtained is as objective as possible. However, the method is rather time-consuming and also error-prone in the application, especially in contrast to methods proposed for the same purpose that provide an interpretation proposal in one step. We present a new software tool, The LCA Evaluator, to be used for interpretation of LCA results, where the German EPA method and other evaluation methods are implemented. The implementation in software reduces the application time drastically, it reduces errors in application, and it allows considering uncertainties in impact category data via Monte Carlo simulation. We investigate the problem of value choices in the interpretation, briefly introduce evaluation methods for LCAs, briefly present the new tool discussing also drawbacks of the application, and demonstrate the use by a case study
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    openLCA – Implications of an Emerging Open Source Software for Sustainability Assessment
    (Environmental Informatics and Industrial Ecology, 2008) Ciroth, Andreas; Srocka, Michael; Hildenbrand, Jutta
    openLCA has started in late 2006 as a project to create a high performance, open source software for sustainability assessment, with an initial focus on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Meanwhile, a first version has been sent out to external testers, and a funding consortium has established. We will briefly describe the architecture of the application, and will then concentrate on two aspects. First, we critically analyse whether and how it was possible to create a contributing community for the project. Creating such a community is a challenge since on the one side, there seems overwhelming interest in the LCA field to open source and "for free" high performance tools; on the other side, IT knowledge is scarce among LCA experts. Second, we present a case study from the textile industry in order to show capabilities and drawbacks of the software, with special emphasis on its "open source nature". Finally, we conclude by investigating possible implications our open source application for a well established business field and market might have, of specialised closed source applications plus consulting and research provided by using these tools. This investigation will be based on indications from our present project, but will also be framed in a more general perspective.
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    The openLCA Plug-in Structure – Opening up an Open Source Sustainability Assessment Software
    (Environmental Informatics and Industrial Environmental Protection: Concepts, Methods and Tools, 2009) Srocka, Michael; Greve, Sebastian; Ciroth, Andreas
    In the openLCA project, open source software for life cycle assessments (LCA) and sustainability analysis of products and services is developed. The first beta version was released September 2008. One of the main goals for the next version was to make it possible to easily extend the openLCA framework with standard extension mechanisms provided by the Eclipse platform. At the same time new features like graphical modelling of product systems, parameterisation, or uncertainty calculations were implemented. Therefore we restructured openLCA and adapted the Eclipse plug-in mechanisms to our LCA calculation software. This opens openLCA up for extensions on a higher level than before: defined entry points, also for calculation algorithms and assessment methods, will make it easily possible to extend openLCA without need for detailed knowledge about the core implementation, nor a re-compilation of the core framework.