Logo des Repositoriums

Auflistung nach Autor:in "Ciroth, Andreas"

1 - 9 von 9
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    A Model to Dynamically Change Settings in a Life Cycle Assessment for Packaging Systems
    (The Information Society and Enlargement of the European Union, 2003) Ciroth, Andreas
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    An Emergent Open Network and Global Fund For Community-Driven Sustainable Development
    (Sh@ring – EnviroInfo 2004, 2004) Norris, Gregory A.; Ciroth, Andreas
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Business Models for Open Source Projects in Environmental Informatics
    (Environmental Informatics and Industrial Ecology, 2008) Ciroth, Andreas
    Generating a healthy business model is one of the main challenges when setting up an open source project. In this presentation, I will explore how sound, healthy business models for open source projects can look like, with a focus on environmental informatics. I will do so by first analysing which elements of open source projects exist that can, potentially, generate turnover, and will then estimate the relevance of these different elements, for different types of projects, taking into account costs and other efforts. This will be illustrated by several cases, including the openLCA project where I am involved in myself. Result of this is an overview of types of business models of successful open source projects, that each deploy means that fit best to their specific situation. Result is further that these business models frequently do not follow a common pattern; finding these requires often a wider view of analysis, and more creativity, and under certain circumstances, business models are likely to fail. These critical circumstances will be highlighted, as to be carefully avoided when tailoring a new project. I will conclude with a tentative outlook on further development of the identified project types.
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Efficient Software support for Interpretation of Life Cycle Assessment Results - The LCA Evaluator
    (Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) Ciroth, Andreas; Srocka, Michael; Liu, Ran
    Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are increasingly recognised as a means to assess the environmental performance of products in a holistic and reliable manner, with increased use for supporting decisions in business and policy. LCAs typically provide information on product-related impacts in a variety of different (environmental) impact categories. When comparing the impacts of different products, then diverging results for single categories often cause problems in the interpretation. They require the consideration of trade-offs between impact categories to come to an overall conclusion, and thus require introducing value choices. The German EPA has developed a structured approach for the interpretation of LCA impact category results, intended to be applied by a panel of environmental experts. The approach introduces value choices stepwise into the interpretation procedure and comes to a conclusion with not more value choices than necessary, ensuring that the recommendation obtained is as objective as possible. However, the method is rather time-consuming and also error-prone in the application, especially in contrast to methods proposed for the same purpose that provide an interpretation proposal in one step. We present a new software tool, The LCA Evaluator, to be used for interpretation of LCA results, where the German EPA method and other evaluation methods are implemented. The implementation in software reduces the application time drastically, it reduces errors in application, and it allows considering uncertainties in impact category data via Monte Carlo simulation. We investigate the problem of value choices in the interpretation, briefly introduce evaluation methods for LCAs, briefly present the new tool discussing also drawbacks of the application, and demonstrate the use by a case study
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Key IT-results of the BioEnergieDat Project
    (Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Environmental Informatics - Informatics for Environmental Protection, Sustainable Development and Risk Management, 2013) Düpmeier, Clemens; Schebek, Liselotte; Ciroth, Andreas; Kusche, Oliver
    The BioEnergieDat project had been carried out by a consortium of German research organizations for the German Ministry of Environment as one important part of the German Sustainable Biomass Strategy. The main goals of the project were the development of a comprehensive database of LCI data sets describing important Bioenergy process chains in a flexible and customizable way and the development of an associated open source software infrastructure for LCA modelling of Bioenergy technologies for German framework conditions. One of the main requirements of the project was that the provided data sets can be used in different LCA modelling situations and shouldn t restrict users to only one usage context, i.e. performing only a certain type of LCA study. Therefore, new methodological approaches and enhancements to the underlying data set model / format had also to be developed and implemented to fulfil these requirements. Both, the tool environment developed in BioEnergieDat for LCA modelling of bioenergy technologies and key IT-aspects to support the new modelling approaches are described in further detail.
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    openLCA – Implications of an Emerging Open Source Software for Sustainability Assessment
    (Environmental Informatics and Industrial Ecology, 2008) Ciroth, Andreas; Srocka, Michael; Hildenbrand, Jutta
    openLCA has started in late 2006 as a project to create a high performance, open source software for sustainability assessment, with an initial focus on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Meanwhile, a first version has been sent out to external testers, and a funding consortium has established. We will briefly describe the architecture of the application, and will then concentrate on two aspects. First, we critically analyse whether and how it was possible to create a contributing community for the project. Creating such a community is a challenge since on the one side, there seems overwhelming interest in the LCA field to open source and "for free" high performance tools; on the other side, IT knowledge is scarce among LCA experts. Second, we present a case study from the textile industry in order to show capabilities and drawbacks of the software, with special emphasis on its "open source nature". Finally, we conclude by investigating possible implications our open source application for a well established business field and market might have, of specialised closed source applications plus consulting and research provided by using these tools. This investigation will be based on indications from our present project, but will also be framed in a more general perspective.
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    RFM2 — Calculating Qualitative Information
    (The Information Society and Enlargement of the European Union, 2003) Hölzinger, Nadine; Ciroth, Andreas
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    The openLCA Plug-in Structure – Opening up an Open Source Sustainability Assessment Software
    (Environmental Informatics and Industrial Environmental Protection: Concepts, Methods and Tools, 2009) Srocka, Michael; Greve, Sebastian; Ciroth, Andreas
    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.
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Towards a Complete Tool Chain for Eco-Balancing Governmental Buildings
    (Proceedings of the 28th Conference on Environmental Informatics - Informatics for Environmental Protection, Sustainable Development and Risk Management, 2014) Düpmeier, Clemens; Kusche, Oliver; Brockmann, Tanja; Rössig, Stephan; Ciroth, Andreas; Lode, Tobias
    With the Assessment System for Sustainable Buildings for Federal Buildings (BNB), Germany is pioneering the implementation of certification systems for Sustainable Buildings in Europe. Using BNB methodology and tools, building products are not assessed as individual products, but looked at within the context of the entire building and its parts. The most important impacts of the building on the global environment (i.e. environmental burdens like ozone depletion or consumption of resources like energy and water) are assessed by means of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology and are calculated according to the Type III Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) standard for building products described in ISO 14025 and EN 15804. This paper will describe the tool chain needed to first calculate EPD data sets in LCA tools, store them in a central repository, the ÖKOBAU.DAT, and how the EPD data sets can then be used in other tools for calculating the environmental footprint of an entire building.