Life Cycle Assessment is a tool for identifying the environmental releases and evaluating the associated impacts caused by a product, process, or activity. An assessment involves defining and describing the product, process, or activity; establishing fully the context in which the assessment is being made; identifying the life cycle stages being covered; evaluating environmental releases at each stage; determining the aggregate and specific impacts of the releases; and developing opportunities to effect environmental improvements.
This paper presents an object-oriented approach to software development of Life Cycle Assessment based on modeling and objects from the real world and then using the model to build a language-independent design organized around those objects. Object-oriented modeling and design promote better understanding of requirements, cleaner designs, and more maintainable systems. This paper shows a set of object-oriented modeling and design based on a language-independent graphical notation, the Object Modeling Technique, that can be used to analyze problem requirement, design a solution the problem, and then implement the solution in a programming language or database. This approach allows the same concepts and notation to be used throughout the Life Cycle Assessment software development process. The software developer does not need to translate into a new notation at each development stage as is required by many other methodologies.
This paper is primarily about object-oriented analysis and design of Life Cycle Assessment. It defers implementation details until later stages of design to preserve flexibility. A prototype of Life Cycle Assessment Software is under construction on Visual Basic windows programming language and Microsoft Excel.
