Load LCA data

LCA data must be loaded, which is harder than it seems. Most workflows are based on nice visual spreadsheets to easily be edited, which is literally a nightmare to then automatically retrieve the information for further automated tasks. A change of one letter in a non-relevant cell, a new row or a new column, and the algorithm is completely lost. To cope with these limitations as good as possible, a specific module is dedicated to simply load the impact data.

As detailed in different places in the documentation, the impacts per production unit type is used by EcoDynElec as a matrix called Unit Impact Vector. Such a matrix can be directly provided as a file, or obtained by extracting the information from a mapping file. The Unit Impact Vector is simply an already shaped matrix of data, ready-to-use.

The mapping file is an xlsx spreadsheet. A blank template may be downloaded on the git repository. The document must be provided blank as it relies on data which require information provided by proprietary sources such as the Ecoinvent database. Details about this mapping file and its structure is provided in a dedicated page of the documentation.