LCA Capability Roadmap: Product System Model Description and Revision

Life cycle assessment (LCA) practitioners face many challenges in their efforts to describe, share, review, and revise their product system models; and to reproduce the models and results of others. Current Life cycle inventory modeling techniques have weaknesses in the areas of describing model structure; documenting the use of proxy or non-ideal data; specifying allocation; and including modeler's observations and assumptions -- all affecting how the study is interpreted and limiting the reuse of models. Moreover, LCA software systems manage modeling information in different and sometimes non-compatible ways. Practitioners must also deal with licensing, privacy / confidentiality of data, and other issues around data access which impact how a model can be shared. The aim of this SETAC North America working group is to define a roadmap of the technical advances needed to achieve easier LCA model sharing and improve replicability of LCA results among different users in a way that is independent of the LCA software used to compute the results and does not infringe on any licensing restrictions or confidentiality requirements.