Contest entry - Aleksandra Kim

Submitter

Hi, my name is Aleksandra (Sasha) Kim, I am a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich.

Description

My entry is a dashboard that attempts to combine the story and motivation of global sensitivity analysis of life cycle assessment, with necessary computations, and visualization of the results - all in one place.

The main goal is to make GSA of LCA easier to understand, conduct and interpret. This is why I felt the need to not only provide computations and visualizations, but also explain the underlying components, such as matrix-based LCA model, its degree of linearity, how numerical Monte Carlo simulations are performed, what is the difference between contribution and sensitivity analysis, and how can GSA results be validated. This is the very first version, so it only performs GSA for foreground databases at the moment.

The dashboard contains the following:

Control panel, so that the user can define brightway project, functional unit, method, etc.
Tab "Motivation" with the explanations of LCA, GSA and LCA model.
Tab "Uncertainty propagation", where one can run MC simulations for the selected LCA study.
Tab "Global sensitivity analysis" that displays model linearity at different number of iterations, and ranked list of influential LCA model inputs once MC simulations are done. This table also contains visual bar plots for "GSA indices" and "Contributions to the LCIA score" to help interpret the results.
Tab "GSA validation" allows to validate the computed GSA results.

Database(s) used

[ ] Used example data from the contest repository
[x] Used another databases 👉 ecoinvent on the background, and foreground inventories on impacts of lithium from brines taken from this case study .