PurposeLife 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.MethodsThis letter was prepared by a working group of the North American Life Cycle Assessment Advisory Group to support the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative’s Flagship Activity on Data, Methods, and Product Sustainability Information. The aim of the 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. This is intended to be a consensus document providing the state of the art in this area, with milestones for research and implementation needed to resolve current issues.Results and ConclusionsThe roadmap identifies fifteen milestones in three areas: “describing model contents,” “describing model structure,” and “collaborative use of models.” The milestones should support researchers and software developers in advancing practitioners’ abilities to share and review product system models.

中文翻译：

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LCA能力路线图——产品系统模型描述与修订

目的生命周期评估 (LCA) 从业者在描述、共享、审查和修改他们的产品系统模型以及复制其他人的模型和结果的努力中面临许多挑战。当前的生命周期清单建模技术在描述模型结构、记录代理或非理想数据的使用、指定分配以及包括建模者的观察和假设等领域存在弱点——所有这些都会影响研究的解释方式并限制模型的重用. 此外，LCA 软件系统以不同且有时不兼容的方式管理建模信息。从业人员还必须处理许可、数据隐私/机密性以及其他影响模型共享方式的数据访问问题。方法这封信由北美生命周期评估咨询小组的一个工作组编写，以支持 UNEP-SETAC 生命周期倡议在数据、方法和产品可持续性信息方面的旗舰活动。该工作组的目标是定义一个技术进步路线图，以实现更轻松的 LCA 模型共享和提高不同用户之间 LCA 结果的可复制性，这种方式独立于用于计算结果的 LCA 软件并且不侵犯任何许可限制或保密要求。这旨在成为提供该领域最新技术水平的共识文件，其中包含解决当前问题所需的研究和实施里程碑。结果和结论路线图确定了三个领域的十五个里程碑：“描述模型内容，”“描述模型结构”和“模型的协同使用”。里程碑应该支持研究人员和软件开发人员提高从业人员共享和审查产品系统模型的能力。