The openLCA Plug-in Structure – Opening up an Open Source Sustainability Assessment Software

Abstract

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.